The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends, many secrets of the spiritual world must first be explained symbolically or half symbolically, although the images are real and should be taken as realities. It is necessary to use an imaginative language, as I mean to do to-day, it is necessary to speak in the form of images which you can meditate in your soul, because long explanations would be needed if one were to speak: in the form of concepts and not symbolically. But those who bear in mind the things which I shall explain to you to day and who meditate upon them, will not fail to discover the deeper essence which they contain.

About this time of year we always pass over from one period into another. To be sure, this may at first appear to us a mere subdivision of time, but this is not the case. For a deeper instinct led the people, who had to fix the seasons of the year, to follow certain great laws governing the course of time. The festival which marks the transition from an old year to a new one is celebrated in our part of the world in the midst of winter, when the plants cease to grow, blossom and bear fruit. Only certain forest trees keep their so-called evergreen foliage throughout the winter. The sun unfolds its weakest power.

We know that spiritual processes are interwoven with all the processes which we perceive through our senses. We know that when we go through the woods we are not only surrounded by the trees with their green needles or leaves, but that a soul-spiritual essence weaves and works in the mysterious depths of life. We have already seen that things which in the eyes of our “clever” modern people appear as childish superstition, can be experienced as something which points to the real essence of the world.

We are therefore convinced that spiritual forces and influences lie at the foundation of everything physical, of the solid substances or of the physical phenomena which we can perceive through our senses. Let us now look upon the so-called lifeless an-organic earth, upon everything which constitutes the earth's mineral kingdom; let us look upon everything which is not endowed with life. To the materialist these lifeless substances appear devoid of life. But in every lifeless object we can see a soul-element, a spiritual element, so that we can also speak of a soul and spirit pertaining to our so-called lifeless, an-organic, purely mineral earth. When we speak of the consciousness of the earth, we cannot perceive in its geological-mineralogical substance even the trace of anything that can be compared with man's muscles and the blood; we can only see the earth's skeleton, or the earth's solid substance, so that when we speak of the earth's consciousness, we must think of it as being contained in the whole earth, which does not only consist of a skeleton, or of solid parts, but also of water, air, etc., which correspond to the muscles, the blood, etc. of man. The whole earth is endowed with consciousness, with a consciousness which forms part of the mineral kingdom. We shall not speak of the change in the earth's consciousness during the course of the year in a definite region, but shall instead enter more deeply into the idea that the whole earth is endowed with consciousness. Let us now turn away our gaze from the whole mineral earth and observe the plants which sprout and blossom out of the earth.

If we study the vegetable kingdom from the standpoint of spiritual science we must first look upon it as an independent being in respect to the earth. The fact that the vegetable kingdom as a whole is an independent being in respect to the earth, becomes clearly evident if we study the consciousness of these two beings. We can speak of a consciousness pertaining to the whole mineral earth, but we can also speak of a consciousness pertaining to the whole vegetable kingdom which develops upon the earth. The laws which govern this consciousness of course differ from the laws which govern human consciousness. When we speak of the consciousness of plants, we can only bear in mind a definite region of the earth, because the consciousness changes according to the various regions of the earth.

As human beings we do not notice that there is a certain parallelism between our consciousness and, for instance, the consciousness of the vegetable kingdom of the whole earth, because our daytime consciousness, not our night-consciousness, is a fully conscious state. In order to simplify matters, let us say that during our waning daytime consciousness our Ego and our astral body are within our physical body. I have already explained to you that in reality this only applies to our blood and nerve system, but not to the other systems. For when the Ego and the astral body are, as it were, outside the head, they permeate all the more the remaining parts of our organism.

Parallel to this we have the fact that when, for instance, there is winter on one side of the earth, there is summer on the other side. This too is only a transformation of consciousness. It is the same with us human beings. But we do not notice it, because these two states of consciousness are not equally clear. They have different degrees of strength. The night-consciousness is a dulled state of consciousness, practically no consciousness at all, and the daytime consciousness is a full state of consciousness pertaining to the other side of our being. Our lower nature is awake during the night, when our higher nature is asleep, and this is also the case with the earth, for when it is winter on one side, it is summer on the other side. When there is a waiting state of consciousness in one part of our being, there is a sleeping state in the other and vice-versa.

As explained just now (this has frequently been dealt with in other lectures) this only applies to the vegetable kingdom. In the height of summer the vegetable kingdom sleeps, because it sprouts and grows; it sleeps, while it unfolds its physical part to the utmost. And it is fully awake at that time of the year when it does not pass through any external physical development. The vegetable kingdom is then awake. We therefore speak of all the plants upon the earth as a whole; and this whole is endowed with consciousness.

When we speak of this consciousness, which therefore constitutes a second state of consciousness permeating the earth's mineral consciousness, when we speak of this plant-consciousness; we can really say that in our part of the world this plant-consciousness is asleep during the summer and awake during the dark winter season.

But at this time of the year something else takes place. You see, these two states of consciousness, viz. the whole earth-consciousness pertaining to the mineral kingdom and the whole plant-consciousness are distinct and separate: throughout the year they are two separate beings. Yet they are not ONLY two beings, for they permeate each other, so that one is filled by the other during that time of the year in which we are now living. When the old year passes over into the new year, the mineral objects and processes of the earth and the whole vegetable kingdom have ONE consciousness; that is to say, the two states of consciousness interpenetrate.

Of what kind is the MINERAL consciousness of the earth? To-day, however, we shall not consider its different stages in the same way in which we shall consider the consciousness of the plants, which is awake in the winter and asleep in the summer. What is the characteristic of the mineral consciousness, of the consciousness pertaining to the great being of the earth? Those who only rely upon their physical senses and upon the intellect which they think forms part of the physical senses, cannot know anything of this great consciousness of the earth. But spiritual science teaches us to observe the thoughts of the earth-consciousness, for the earth has thoughts, even as we have thoughts of minerals, plants and animals, of the air, the rivers and mountains. The earth has thoughts, in the same way in which we have thoughts concerning our environment, when we live in our ordinary daytime consciousness. What does the earth think? What thoughts live in its consciousness?

In the consciousness of the earth there are to begin with, thoughts connected with the whole heavenly space pertaining to the earth. Even as our eyes look upon the trees and stones, so the consciousness of the earth looks out into the heavenly spaces and harbours thoughts of all that goes on in the stars. The earth is a being that thinks about the stars and the events connected with them.

The mineral consciousness thus contains the secrets of the whole cosmos in the form of thought. Whereas we human beings walk over the surface of the earth and only think of the stones on our path or of many other things in our surroundings which we perceive through our senses, the earth thinks of the cosmos outside; these are the things which live in the consciousness of the earth, and as we walk through space we pass through the consciousness of the earth. The earth has a far wider consciousness and far greater thoughts than we. And it is really an uplifting thought to know: “As you walk along over the surface of the earth, you do not only pass through its atmosphere, but you pass through the thoughts of the earth.”

Let us now envisage something else—let us consider the consciousness of the plants. You see, plants cannot have great thoughts like those of the earth, for their consciousness, the thinking consciousness of the vegetable world (of the WHOLE vegetable kingdom, not of single plants) is far more limited; throughout the year it embraces a far smaller sphere pertaining to the earth—EXCEPT IN THESE DAYS, for at this time of the year (end of December/early January) the consciousness of the plants permeates the consciousness of the earth. The vegetable kingdom becomes aware of the secrets of the stars, it comprehends the mysteries of the stairs and uses them, so that in the springtime the plants may unfold again and bear blossoms and fruits in accordance with the mysteries of the cosmos. For the whole mystery of the cosmos is contained in the way in which the plants bear leaves, blossoms and fruits.

But while the plants develop their leaves, flowers and fruits they cannot develop thoughts about these processes. They can think of these processes only at this time of the year, when the consciousness of the vegetable world unites with the consciousness of the mineral world.

In spiritual science we therefore say; Two cycles interpenetrate at this time of the year, approximately around New Year's Eve.

The secret of existence consists in the fact that cycles INTERPENETRATE, continue their development separately and again interpenetrate. How wonderful is this secret of life! Two streams of development—the vegetable consciousness and the mineral consciousness, which take their course separately throughout the year, unite when one year passes over into the next. Then they develop separately until the end of the year when they unite once more. This constitutes the cyclic course of history.

Let us now pass over from this mystery, which can fill us with a deep, sacred feeling of reverence for the secret of the transition of one annual cycle into the next, let us now pass over to a still greater mystery. You know that we are living in the cycle which is connected with the development of the Consciousness-soul, which was preceded by the cycle connected with the development of the Understanding or Intellectual soul and by the cycle connected with the Sentient soul? If we go back still further, we come to the development of the Sentient Body. This leads us to the year 5000 B.C., when all human thinking developed under the influence of the sentient body, the so-called astral body.

In the course of human evolution we shall have to pass through the consciousness soul, the Spirit-Self, and still higher stages of development.

At the present time the consciousness-soul develops chiefly through the fact that the human being only uses his physical body as an instrument of perception. This brought us to the present; climax of materialism (we dealt with this in other lectures), for we use above all our physical body. But a time will come when we shall not only use the physical body, but also the etheric body, even as we once used our astral body, during the epoch of human development when the astral body supplied the chief foundation of consciousness.

We may therefore say: Once upon a time we lived upon the earth in such a way that our soul passed through a phase in which its consciousness contacted with the consciousness of our astral body. Even as at the end of the year the plants' consciousness passes through the. mineral consciousness, so thousands of years ago our soul passed through our astral body, through the consciousness pertaining to our astral body. At that time, the consciousness of our soul and the consciousness of our astral body were one. This leads us back thousands of years, to the year 6000 B.C. When this state of consciousness began, humanity on earth celebrated a new year, a great cosmic new year. Even as the new year now brings with it a union of the consciousness of the plants with the consciousness of the minerals, so 6000 years before our Christian ere marked the beginning of a new cosmic year upon the earth. It was a great cosmic new year! Our soul's consciousness then passed Through the astral consciousness. of our body.

What took place at that time? At that time, 6000 years B.C., when our inner soul-consciousness passed through the astral consciousness of our body, our limited human consciousness, such as we have it now, extended as far as the consciousness of the plants at New Year. Even as the plant looks out into the heavenly spaces, through the fact that its consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness, so 6000 years B.C. the human being saw and perceived an extensive field of wisdom, during that ancient cosmic NEW YEAR, when his soul united with the astral body.

From that time comes the lost wisdom (we spoke of this a few. days ago), the gnostic wisdom which disappeared. We must look for the origin of this wisdom in the cosmic New Year about 6000 years before our era. This, is the source from which Zarathustra drew his knowledge; it is the wisdom that illumined the Gnostics with its last rays, but as already explained, only a few traces of this gnostic wisdom have remained to us. It is the winter of the earth, but at the same time a cosmic new year of the earth, to which we go back.

Now add about 4000 years to the time which has passed since the founding of Christianity; this will bring us to a time when we shall again pass through our astral consciousness, but upon a higher stage. Our soul will again pass through our astral consciousness, through a cosmic star-consciousness. Let us prepare ourselves for this event, so that it may not find us unprepared.

Let us prepare ourselves for this Cosmic New Year! By preparing ourselves for the Christmas Festival, as explained during one of my last lectures, we prepare ourselves in the right way for the Cosmic New Year. If the birth of spiritual knowledge lives within us as a sacred Christmas feeling, we prepare ourselves in the right way for the new Cosmic New Year, which begins 12,000 years after the old cosmic year.

Twelve months of the year pass by from the union of the earth's vegetable consciousness with the mineral consciousness, to another union. Twelve thousands of years pass by from one Cosmic New Year to the other Cosmic New Year of the earth, from one passage of the human soul through the astral world to a new passage of the human soul through the astral world.

In this solemn hour, we thus look from the new year upon a small scale to the New Year upon a great cosmic scale, from the ordinary New Year's Eve to the cosmic New Year's Eve, for which we prepare ourselves if we try to perceive in the very midst of winter the light which only streams towards us, as inhabitants of the earth, during a cosmic New Year. Then it comes to us in a natural, elemental way.

We really see the world in its true light if we perceive the surrounding world not only in the way in which it appears to our senses, not only in accordance with a materialistic mentality, but if we look upon the external physical world as a symbol for the great mysteries of the cosmos.

The approach of New Year's Eve may therefore appear to us like the approach of a messenger from the spiritual world, revealing to us the mysteries connected with the end of the year and bringing us the following message:

“Behold, in the midst of the dark cold winter season the vegetable consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness of the earth. Let this be a sign to you that the earth too has its own cycle, namely the great cosmic year mentioned by Zarathustra, which goes from one Cosmic New Year's Eve to the other, and which we must understand if we wish to grasp the course of human development.”

Zarathustra speaks of twelve thousands of years, the twelve thousand years mentioned just now. He described the course of one Earthly Year, and divided it into four seasons representing the course of human evolution upon the earth. This is deeply rooted in the spiritual mysteries.

Let us fill our hearts and souls with a festive, earnest feeling, born out of a deeper comprehension of our spiritual science. Let us unfold within our heart that inner warmth which can be felt when in the midst of the cold winter night we hear the message of the Sun-Spirit's descent to the earth and then learn to know the mystery of the year's course.

The thirteen days from the 24th of December to the 6th of January are the days in which the plants' consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness. If the human being can transfer himself into the consciousness of the plants, he can see and dream of many mysteries which pass through his heart in many forms—he can have dreams such as that of Olaf Åsteson.

If we develop such feelings and moods, we obtain the right attitude towards the aims of our spiritual knowledge; these warm feelings which stream through our heart are a preparation for the New Cosmic Year, and they enable us to await it worthily, to look forward to that cosmic New Year's Eve which brings a new cosmic year. In future incarnations, when our souls will pass through the great Cosmic New Year, we shall experience it in the right way if the end of the year which closes the small cycle of twelve months becomes a symbol for the great end of the year which closes a cycle of twelve thousand years.

This is the secret of our existence. The things which take place upon a small scale always correspond to the things which take place upon a large scale, and upon a large scale the things are the same as upon a small scale. The small scale, the course of one year, can only be grasped if it becomes a symbol for the great cosmic course, for the cycle which encompasses thousands of years.

The year is an image for the Aeons. And Aeons are the reality of symbols which we encounter in the course of one year. If we really understand the year's course, our hearts will be deeply moved toy the mysteries of the cosmos, at this time of the year which marks the beginning of a new year. Let us try to attune our soul so that it can look into the new year conscious of the fact that it can bear within it the year's course as a symbol for the great COSMIC course, which encompasses all the mysteries pursued, by spiritual Beings who surge and weave through the universe from aeon to aeon, in the same way in which the Lesser Gods pursue the mysteries connected with the development of the vegetable and mineral Kingdoms during the course of one year.

One of the most important lectures on the etheric appearance of Christ was given at Nuremberg on the 13th of November 1910. The text of this lecture containing many details was published in the News Sheet in 1937 (page 105) under the title “THE WISDOM CONTAINED IN ANCIENT DOCUMENTS AND IN THE GOSPELS. THE EVENT OF THE CHRIST.” The text of the lecture which preceded it was discovered on looking through the notes of the lecture. This lecture of the 12th of November contains many valuable details on the effects and influences of Karma. And it should meet an objective and historical interest to publish this brief resume of the lecture given on the 12th of November in the News Sheet.

MARIE STEINER

Today I must tell you a few things on morality and karma and tomorrow I shall speak on the appearance of Christ and reveal a few facts which have not yet been revealed.

Theosophy becomes really fruitful if we can observe its influence on our own life and if it becomes living substance within us. Theosophical principles can be looked upon as interesting doctrines, but theoretically it is difficult to gain a real conviction of the truth implied by the spiritual-scientific doctrines, in the real meaning of the word. Of course, all theosophical facts discovered along the path of genuine spiritual-scientific investigation can be tested by the human intellect and recognized through logic; but if we take in spiritual-scientific truths we are still a long way from being able to test them. Among our audience many people prefer to tread an easier path, which is to accept spiritual truths on the authority of a teacher. This is far more comfortable. On the other hand, however, there is hardly any other alternative for the great majority of people, for the independent testing of spiritual-scientific truths is a very difficult path; the other path, of observing life in itself, is far easier. But if the laws of Karma hold good, life itself must take on a form which shows us how Karma works in the experiences of life and in the development of character. Those who strive after spiritual truths will more easily gain a conviction of these truths by observing facts supported by life itself.

I shall take two widely-spread qualities as a starting point in this lecture. Taken as moral qualities, there has always been a strong, instinctive repugnance against them. ENVY and FALSEHOOD have always been considered as a special moral failing. This special aversion may be seen in the fact that in the case of no other human error is the repugnance so strong and instinctive as in the case of envy and falsehood. This feeling may be found in great men and in insignificant people. Benvenuto Cellini, who was a great man, once said that he felt himself capable of every kind of sin, but that he could not remember any real lie which he had told. Also Goethe found a certain relief in being able to say that he had never harboured any feeling of envy. Consequently the souls of the simplest people and the souls of highly developed men have an instinctive repugnance against envy and falsehood and defend themselves against them.

Without taking into consideration the theosophical aspect it may be said, first of all, that envy and falsehood are visibly an offence against a fundamental element of social life: they are an offence against the feeling of compassion. Compassion does not only imply sharing another's grief and pain, but it also implies experiencing his value. Compassion is a quality which is not greatly developed among men. It still contains a great amount of egoism. Of Herder it is said, for instance (he intended to study medicine) that he fainted when he first entered an operating theatre where a corpse was to be dissected; he fainted not through compassion, but through weakness and egoism, because he could not bear that sight. Compassion must become less selfish; we should be able to rejoice at another person's success and rise; we should be able to look upon his good qualities without any feeling of bitterness.

Compassion is a fundamental element in the soul life which we share with others because all human soul experiences are connected with each other. Envy and falsehood in particular offend against the capacity of appraising another person's value. We damage our fellow man through envy and falsehood.

Envy and falsehood bring us in opposition to the course of the universe; by envy and falsehood we harm the laws which govern the world's course of events. They can easily be recognized as errors and people do not tolerate them.

As a rule both envy and falsehood have occult backgrounds. Certain mysterious laws hold sway, which easily escape our observation, and they work in such a way that both envy and falsehood can arise in the same person in later years.

Envy does not always take on the form of conscious green envy. Of course, if anyone is conscious of this feeling, he tries to get rid of it. Envy as such is a quality rooted in the astral body of man. We know that feelings, passions, etc. should be looked for in the astral body. There is a certain law according to which qualities arising in the astral body and which are so detestable that we wish to get rid of them, gradually insinuate themselves into the etheric body. There they take on delusive aspects and appear in the guise of certain definite judgments which we pass on other people. No envy is contained in these judgments, yet we criticize people and find everything in them bad. This is a secret form of envy which creeps into our etheric body. There it takes on the form of an opinion, of a critical judgment. We say: This person has done this or that, and our statement may seem perfectly correct; nevertheless it contains envy in a masked form. What has taken place? A very significant process has taken place.

We know that the human soul passes through many incarnations and that there was a moment in the development of mankind when the tempters, Lucifer and Ahriman, crept into the human soul. In what form do Lucifer and Ahriman live within us today? This is not easy to discover without the aid of clairvoyant investigation, and Goethe expressed a deep truth when he said: “Folks do not notice the Devil, even when he takes them by the scruff of the neck!” IN fact, it is possible to ignore the devil; it is possible not to see him. From the standpoint of modern natural science it is easy to say that Mephistopheles does not exist; nevertheless, Lucifer and Ahriman live in human nature. Ahriman lives in the etheric body and Lucifer in the astral body of man.

Lucifer is a power that tempts the human soul by drawing it down morally and by leading it away from its origin. He casts us into the depths of earthly nature and we should beware of this. Lucifer is the power that draws us down into the depths of passion.

Ahriman, on the other hand, is the spirit of falsehood and error and he falsifies our judgments.

Both Lucifer and Ahriman are powers which are hostile to human progress. Yet they get on very well with each other. Envy is a quality in which the Luciferic power comes to expression. It is a detestable quality and that is why people dislike it. They seek to get rid of it, to overcome it and drive it away. When a person first discovers that his soul is filled with envy, he begins to fight against Lucifer, the source of envy. What does Lucifer do in that case? He simply hands over the matter to Ahriman, and Ahriman darkens the human judgment.

When we fight against Lucifer in the astral body, Ahriman can easily insinuate himself into the etheric body, darkening our judgments on other people. This is falsehood and falsehood is an Ahrimanic quality.

People also feel a strong dislike for falsehood and they try to fight against it. When we try to overcome falsehood, we can see that Ahriman hands over the scepter to Lucifer, so that a quality creeps into the astral body which appears in the form of an extremely pronounced EGOISM. Egoism is restrained falsehood.

These two qualities, falsehood and envy, are a crass expression of the way in which Lucifer and Ahriman work within the human soul.

It is possible to observe the influence of envy and falsehood even in the course of a single incarnation. Let us now speak of facts which prove the truth of theosophical teachings. Let us observe a certain period in a person's life and let us suppose that this person was strongly addicted to telling lies. The law of Karma would in that case exercise its influence and we should wait until this becomes manifest. It is, however, possible to observe in the present incarnation the connection which exists between an earlier and a later period of life. A study of human life may show us that a person perhaps lost the habit of telling lies—for life itself is a great school—but he will reveal instead a new, plainly marked characteristic: a certain timidity. There are people who cannot look us in the face and it is possible to observe a certain relationship between a feeling of shyness in later life and hypocrisy at some earlier period of life.

Another example: A person may be filled with the feeling of envy. When this has disappeared, when it has been overcome, we can observe that at some later period of life such a person is dependent on others; he will lack independence in the way in which he faces life—be a weak and swaying person.

These connections between falsehood and shyness, envy and lack of independence, which can already be observed in one and the same incarnation, are Karmic connections.

In reality, Karma works in such a way that a faint fulfillment of its laws already comes to expression in one and the same incarnation, though the decisive influence upon man's character only appears in the next incarnation. Helplessness and lack of independence will arise in old age, when envy appeared during youth. This is a faint nuance of the influence of Karma; it remains after death, works throughout kamaloka, etc., and it will be contained in the forces which build up the next life; it will become interwoven with the fundamental character which expresses itself in the three bodies: the physical, etheric and astral bodies.

Goethe expressed this in a very fine way by saying: The desires of our youth are fully realized in our old age. This applies, of course, both to good and bad desires.

In the next life the character qualities build up the three bodies, our character is then the architect of these three bodies. If envy has been a fundamental quality during one incarnation, it will exercise an influence upon the three bodies during the next incarnation and produce, as a result, a weak physical constitution. It works upon the human organism during the next incarnation.

When we see someone facing life in a helpless and dependent way, we must say: “Envy must have been at work during his past incarnation,” and we should behave towards him accordingly. If the laws of Karma hold good, it will soon appear whether our attitude is justified. When we see someone entering life with bad health and a weak constitution, we may take for granted that envy played a certain part in his life during his past incarnation.

When there is such a person in our environment, we must say that Karma led us together with him for a definite purpose: perhaps we were the object of his former envy. What can we now do for him? If Karma is a fact which can be reasonably accepted, if it is a valid truth, it should become manifest that by adopting the right attitude towards such a physically weak person in our environment, a good result can be achieved. What he needs is forgiveness; he needs to encounter this forgiving attitude in the widest measure. Under the condition that we have something to forgive him, we should envelop him in an atmosphere of forgiveness. “You have to forgive him something—therefore do it”; this is what we say to ourselves, but not to HIM—we shall act accordingly and await the result, and we shall see him gaining health and strength. Simply try to do what is right and the result will not fail to appear. This is how we may live in accordance with the laws of Karma and the whole of Theosophy will then become living substance.

Now someone might come along and say: It is quite right that things should have gone wrong with that person, for this is the retribution for what he did during his past incarnation. It is very reasonable that things should have taken this course, because his Karma demands it. People who say this do not understand Karma, for to understand Karma we must know that another person's Karma does not concern us at all! The fulfillment of Karma will come of its own accord; our only task is to help him! We must, however, draw in everything which might bring about a favourable change in his Karma. To know and to feel this forms part of a deep understanding of Karma and its laws. It is another matter when someone is passing through an esoteric development; in that case advice may be given as to the best way in which he can live out his Karma.

Moral qualities in fact produce results; they bring about Karmic effects. They may change during one incarnation. But in the next incarnation they must descend right down into the physical organism.

We said that falsehood may change into timidity during one and the same incarnation, so that a person withdraws into himself. All the more will falsehood in one incarnation produce timidity in the next incarnation. Such a person is born as a timid soul, full of fears. He will not only be shy towards the people of his environment, but he will also fall a prey to certain pathological conditions of fear. The timidity which appeared in one incarnation as a slight karmic effect of falsehood, will therefore appear in the next incarnation as a fundamental organic quality also of the physical body.

What is the right attitude towards a person in whose case we must assume that he told many lies during his past incarnation? We say to ourselves—we do not say this to him—and this should determine our actions: He will have told us many lies during a past incarnation; he misled us. We must try to bring him fruitful and valuable truths. Those who are led together with him by Karma must try to penetrate into his soul with love and devotion. Falsehood must be recompensed by truth; these are two extremes which bring about a kind of compensation.

The secret of the whole matter is that a favourable influence cannot be exercised upon him by anyone, but just by those who are karmically connected with him. Those who adopt this attitude will see what good results can be achieved if he brings him positive truths and has real understanding for him.

Karma is a real law; its result will appear in a very peculiar way. If we lovingly penetrate into the weaknesses of such people, our influence upon them will be an immense relief to them and bring them freedom and health. If we can immerse ourselves completely in them, we shall have a rejuvenating influence upon such people.

Our attitude towards people may be an understanding one or a critical one. What is the effect? We may help them or be unable to help them. We may come towards a person with understanding; i.e., immerse ourselves lovingly in his soul, with a real understanding for his weaknesses, if Karma demands this from us, as a task. But we may also criticize him and remain by this.

Let us observe life in both cases. What is the effect of criticism and rebuke upon the object of such rebuke? One effect can be that the reproaches helped him, but it may also be otherwise. People who habitually criticize and rebuke others will also bring about a certain result: a certain feeling of isolation will take hold of them; they will feel themselves cut off from the others.

Let us compare this with the effects produced in one incarnation, when we immerse ourselves with love and understanding in the other person's soul, in spite of his failings. In this case, too, the result may be a good one or a bad one, but the effect upon the soul will undoubtedly be a favourable one.

This shows us that entirely different laws hold sway when we remain standing, as it were, by criticism and rebuke, or when we progress as far as real understanding. Rebuke recoils upon ourselves and forms new Karma, but understanding gives rise to a store of wealth in the other soul; it dissolves Karma, smoothens it and eliminates it.

This is a very significant fact in life. Let us now recapitulate the result of our observations in a sentence which constitutes a deep truth; namely, that we are in the position to be of very little help to ourselves, and that we can, on the other hand, harm ourselves greatly. We can, however, be of great help to others, whereas we cannot cause them much harm by our own errors. Our good qualities can therefore be of great help to others; our bad qualities cause us great harm, but cannot cause much harm to others, at least not permanently.

This is a very peculiar law. It shows the effect of Karma in one and the same incarnation: for one who helps another person by his good qualities and by immersing himself lovingly in his soul, may be sure of a favourable effect in his own life at some later period. Do not say that this is egoism, that it is selfish to be good and noble. No, goodness must be something quite natural, and its good effect at some later time arises as a natural consequence.

If we do not go beyond our own interests, if we have no understanding for other people and only criticize them, no good effects will arise. The strange thing is that unless we are good towards others we cannot progress; this is a condition for our own progress.

This is a fundamental law passing over from one incarnation to the other, and appearing in a wonderful way. If in one incarnation we are instinctively led to goodness, if a kind of life instinct draws us towards a good life, this will appear in the next life as Theosophy, which will already have exercised its influence. Let us for instance imagine a person who was good to us at a time when we were not yet able to guide ourselves. Here we see a great difference between the different qualities of good—there are the good things in life which we do not deserve (we speak of undeserved good) and we can see that in one case its effect may be a favourable one, whereas in another case it is useless.

The clairvoyant may now perceive something quite special: Another person's good actions towards us, at a time in which we did not deserve them, appear as goodness which we earned back from him. If this is the case, their effect upon us will be a good one; if this is not the case, they cannot have any good effect upon us. When we observe the workings of Karma we should bear in mind that every action has its effect, even though it may not immediately appear to the physical eye.

The paths of Karma are very intricate paths, but if we study life we may understand them, for life contains the proofs for the way in which Karma works in the world. If we study Karma and act accordingly, the success in life itself will show us that we went out from a real law, which holds good.

There are three ways in which we can face Karma: We may not believe in it at all; we may believe in it, and then we may apply the test by observing life itself. This will enable us to recognize the truth of its laws. Theosophy is not only a theoretical truth, but a search for proofs which establish this truth in life itself.

If a school of thought should be successful in the course of human evolution, a school of thought, which does not find acceptance or may even not enjoy the knowledge of the so-called authoritative circles, of the ruling spiritual circles, then it has to fight with the reluctant powers all the time which distinguish themselves within the human civilisation.

We only need to remind of that which happened as Christianity had to assert itself against old ideas, against an old spiritual current in the world. We need only to remind that in the beginning of the new school of thought Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno had to fight against the so-called authoritative circles. We are allowed to suppose that the school of thought inaugurated by Giordano Bruno had to fight against traditions.

In a similar situation is today that school of thought that is represented under the name theosophy in the literature, in talks and the like since several years. If you remember of the destiny of such schools of thought more or less unknown at the moment of their appearance, you find that the way how the ruling circles, the so-called authoritative circles face them, indeed, changes with the fashions of civilisation that, however, the essential part, the lack of understanding, combined with a certain narrow-mindedness, appears over and over again. It is no longer standard today to burn heretics, and in particular liberal circles would protest to be lumped together with such people who burnt heretics. But it may less depend on that. Today the burning of heretics is no longer really trendy. But if we examine the attitude, from which the persecution of heretics arose, and the reasons of such a persecution and compare it with that which takes place in the soul of somebody who fights against the theosophical school of thought more or less today or opposes against it, then we find a similar attitude and similar inner soul processes with the adversaries.

We do not want to enter into discussion with the whole circle of the adversaries of the theosophical world view. We want to confine ourselves rather to that which is connected with our contemporary scholarship; we want to consider the relation of our contemporary scholarship to the theosophical or spiritual-scientific world view as I call it since some time.

Perhaps, it is not meaningless if one starts this consideration with small symptoms. I start with a very widespread small encyclopaedia, a so-called pocket encyclopaedia, which says on its title-page or at least in its preface that it is collated by the best scientific people. If we open it under the catchword “Theosophy,” we find as an explanation only two words: “God-seeker, dreamer.” Such a kind of learnt consideration of the theosophist is now no longer common in all similar reference books, of course. But somebody does probably not become cleverer from this short remark who wants to get to know something about theosophy also not from the other similar reference books.

I have tried to examine in the real philosophical reference books at least externally what is to be found there. I do not want to give an anthology of quotations from such reference books. I would like to give an example only what is to be found in the Dictionary of Philosophical Concepts and Terms, published in Berlin in 1900. In one of the newest works which lists the most of theosophical concepts the following you can read: [Gap in the shorthand notes.] ... these are about three lines with these names. Who wants to get an idea of theosophy from this short representation has to say to himself: also in such philosophical dictionaries we find nothing else than a not correct translation of the term and some names.

Also, otherwise, it does not look especially good if we want to orientate ourselves about that which is represented here as theosophy what the contemporary scholarship knows about that. But the easier this contemporary scholarship wants to condemn theosophy on account of a few little things which it has picked up from any theosophical brochure. We can make the strange experience: a shrug and the remark, “what the theosophical literature spreads is nothing else than warming up a few Buddhist concepts,” or: “it is nothing else than spiritistic superstition expressed somewhat differently.” You can hear such things in abundance. What you hardly hear, however, is a real answer to the question: what is, actually, theosophy? You will find—maybe not only in coffee parties—that which has really happened in a coffee party recently which is, however, not at all so untypical for the standpoint of our contemporaries to theosophy.

There a lady said to another: how is it that you have become a theosophist? This is something terrible, something awful. Take into account what you do to your family; consider how you are in contradiction to that which other people think.—She was silent for a few seconds and said then: what is really theosophy? This did not happen in learnt circles, but you could find something of that kind also in the learnt circles. You can find the judgement again and again that theosophy is nothing scientific at all that it is only enthusiasm of some fantastic people that they bring forward assertions which one cannot prove.

I want to criticise by no means where I want to characterise the relation of our scholarship to theosophy, not even our relation to the circles of scholars. Because nobody else than that who has an overview of our present bringing up of scholars from the theosophical point of view knows better that from this education, from the concepts and ideas of it nothing else can arise than a high-spirited and a somewhat snooty shrug about that which theosophy asserts and which can really appear to that scholarship—because it cannot understand it better—as rapture and as a completely unscientific gossip.

We really want to be fair towards this scholarship. The theosophist stands on a point of view and has to stand on one which I want to show at an example which has not taken place on theosophical ground which could have taken place, however, easily on theosophical ground. The theosophist is in a similar position to the contemporary scholarship rejecting the sneering and the reproach of rapture, as just in the example the recently deceased philosopher Eduard von Hartmann to the materialistic-Darwinist interpretation of nature. I do not want to take sides of the Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann.

But over and over again one would have to point to the way how he faced his adversaries.—In 1869, the Philosophy of the Unconscious appeared, a book of which the theosophist not needs to take sides exactly, a book which was, however, a courageous action at that time. Just the relation of this book to the scholarship of that time can give an example how today the spiritual scientist or theosophist faces his adversaries. This Philosophy of the Unconscious was a courageous action in a certain way. At that time, the waves of the materialistic science surged when the materialistic science had grown up into a kind of materialistic religion,

Books like Energy and Matter by Büchner, other books by Vogt, Moleschott and the like who considered energy and matter, the purely sensuous existence as the only one, they caused great sensation, have experienced many editions and conquered hearts and souls. In that time, everybody was regarded as being a poor devil and a fool who did not join in this choir of materialism who spoke about a self-creative spirit. In this time, when one was of the opinion that Darwin’s work delivered the scientific way of thinking for materialism, in this time, when philosophy itself was a word which one considered as something that was overcome, in this time, Eduard von Hartmann let his Philosophy of the Unconscious appear, a philosophy which has one advantage in spite of its big shortcomings that it attributes the world directly to something spiritual everywhere, looks for the basis of something spiritual in all phenomena, even if the spiritual is considered as something unconscious, even if it takes a particularly high rank.

One thing is certain: there the spirit offers sharp resistance to the materialistic attitude. While at that time the Darwinist school of thought explained nature completely from energy and matter, Eduard von Hartmann tried to understand it in such a way that the spirit should become evident as the inner effectiveness of a spiritual work.—Then those came who believed to be entitled to look down with a shrug on everything that spoke of spirit and judged: there was never anything dilettantish like this Philosophy of the Unconscious. A man speaks there, actually, who has learnt nothing about all the phenomena which Darwinism now explains so scientifically.

There was a lot of counter writings at that time. One also appeared by an unknown author. Its title was The Unconscious from the Standpoint of the Theory of Evolution and Darwinism. It was a thorough refutation of the Philosophy of the Unconscious. The author showed that he was familiar with the latest development of natural sciences. Ernst Haeckel said in a brochure that it would be a pity that the author did not call himself, because he himself could have presented nothing better against Eduard von Hartmann than what is in this writing. Oscar Schmidt wrote a brochure and said that no naturalist would have been able to say anything better against the limitless dilettantism of Eduard von Hartmann than the anonymous author of this brochure. “He may reveal his name to us and we consider him as one of ours.”—The brochure was soon out of stock and the second edition appeared with the name of the author. That was enough to silence the people. It was Eduard von Hartmann. Since that time the chorus was silent of those who had written about the dilettantism of the Philosophy of the Unconscious.

You can argue something against such a procedure, but you cannot deny that it was thoroughly effective. Somebody who was regarded at first as a man who knows nothing has shown to the scientific circles that he could be cleverer than they could ever be. Let me use this trivial expression, it would be good even if somewhat anachronistic to do the same. But that who is at the summit of the theosophical world view could also easily, very easily write together all that stuff which one can today produce against theosophy. This has to be emphasised above all: theosophy is nothing that is directed against the real, true science if it is properly understood. Theosophy is able to understand the true, real science any time as Eduard von Hartmann could understand his adversaries. The reverse is not so easy in the one and the other case. However, we have also to understand where from this could come that way.

If I held a lecture only about that which our scholars know about theosophy, then this lecture could have become rather short, and I would have hardly needed to stand before you longer than for a few seconds. But I would like to go deeper; I would like to speak of the reasons why our contemporary scholarship can know so little about theosophy which opens a new way of thinking about the matters of the world.

If we look around today in our contemporary scholarly literature, we find that these considerations differ, already externally, from all the literature about hundred years ago. If we take a book which has, for example, the title: “The Origin of the Human Being, the Human Being and His Position to the World,” we hardly find anything else than that once the human being did not live on earth that he began his existence on earth in a childish, half animal condition. Then we are made aware of the fact that animal ancestors lived before this time on earth and that these developed to the present-day human being.—If we take another book which should inform us about the secrets of the universe, then we find that it deals with that which you can see through the telescope and what you can achieve with mathematics. In other words: everywhere something that I have called factual fanaticism in my book Goethe’s World-View, that factual fanaticism which keeps to the sensuous facts—to the sense-perceptible facts, at most to that which the armed senses can perceive.

Everything belongs to that which is presented today in the most detailed way in any possible popular writing, and what the human being is solely able to provide of the riddles and secrets of the world on account of scientific facts. If we look around in the circles which draw their knowledge only from such books, then we find that there are, actually, all kinds of intermediate stages that, however, these intermediate stages are to be found between two extremes. The one extreme is the sober scholars. They only accept as scientific what they can see and infer with their reason from the seen. There the world is explored with instruments in all directions. There one searches for written documents, there the time and the development of humankind is investigated according to pure facts. The one is said to be natural sciences, the other is said to be history.

In history you find quite strange things sometimes. In particular if one deals with experiences of spiritual science. You find that there are people who write thick books about the old Gnostics, for example, or about any branch of ancient spiritual wisdom who do not want at all to know anything about this spiritual wisdom itself. They look at this purely historically; they only register the written documents and are contented with it. Today one does not need to be a gnostic to write about Gnosticism. Today scholarly circles regard this almost as a principle. And as the best principle is regarded to be possessed as little as possible from the matters about which one writes, actually. If you take this factual fanaticism on one side, you have nearly what induces such scholarly circles to say: we can notice these matters, we know these matters; what goes beyond them is the object of faith. Everybody can believe or not believe what he wants.—The result of this attitude is a certain indifference to all the objects, thoughts and beings which go beyond the only sensuous facts. Then one says: if anybody needs them for his faith, we leave them to him, but science has nothing to do with them.

A thick dividing wall is raised there between science and faith, and science should be nothing else than what can be perceived purely with the eye and with the ear, nothing else than the consideration of facts and what one abstracts from it. Anything else should not be investigated.—Then, however, something else appears which possibly says: it is not right that science stops anywhere, but this is right that the human being develops more and more and that he unfolds more and more forces in his works, so that he can know everything that there are no limits of knowledge. Indeed, the last objects of knowledge are to be attained only in infinite distance, but they are in such a way that we can approach them more and more. Limits must not be raised anywhere. It seems to be a summit of arrogance if such representatives appear who claim that this ability slumbers in every human being. Develop it and you will see that the objects which once were objects of your faith can become objects of your knowledge, of your wisdom. It is not different with the objects which refer to the immortality of the soul, to the spiritual world, to the big and to the small world in space and to the whole development of the human being; it is not different from the matters which we also meet in the usual natural sciences.

Or, what does a human being, who takes a popular book about astronomy, know from own experience about that which the book says to him? I ask you: how many knowing people are among those who believe in the materialistic history of creation? How many are among those who swear on the materialistic spirit who have seen through a microscope and know how to investigate these matters? How many are there who believe in Haeckel and how many who know in this field? Everybody can become a researcher if he has the time and the energy for it. This also applies to the spiritual matters.

It is brainless if one says that the matters come to an end. It is brainless as well if one says that you have to believe what is in Haeckel’s history of creation, that you yourselves cannot investigate this. In no other sense theosophy speaks of objects and matters of the higher world. One has been accustomed to use the term theosophy for this spiritual science. Not because it has God solely as the object of its consideration, but because it makes a distinction between the external sensuous human being who sees, hears, smells, tastes with his five senses, and combines the sense-perception with his reason—and the other human being who lives in this bodily human being who slumbers in it and can be woken and uses such spiritual organs, spiritual sensory tools, as the body has the physical sensory tools. As the body sees with the physical eye, the mind sees with the spiritual eye. Like the body hears with the physical ear, the mind hears with the spiritual ear.

If the human being takes care of his spiritual development himself, these spiritual organs of perception can be trained, so that the inner human being is able to look into a spiritual world. Because one calls such an inner human being the divine one, I make the difference. What the external sensuous human being beholds, gives sensuous wisdom, what the inner divine human being beholds is, in contrast to sensuous wisdom, theosophy, divine wisdom. Thus it is meant if one speaks of theosophy. One does not speak of theosophy, because God is the object of research, because God is something that becomes obvious to the occultist only at the end of the things, on the summit of perfection. The theosophist will dare least of all to investigate God, although we know that we live, work and exist in Him.

Just as little as somebody, who is sitting on the beach and dives his hand in the sea, believes that he can exhaust the whole sea, the theosophist believes just as little that he can embrace God. However, like somebody, who is sitting on the beach and gets out a handful of water, knows that the scooped water is of the same being as the whole big encompassing sea, the theosophist also knows that he carries a divine spark in himself that is of the same kind and being as God. The theosophist does not claim that his being can embrace God, he does also not claim that in his human soul the infinite God lives, or that the human being himself is God.

He will never come up with such a thing. However, what he says, what he can experience and get to know is something different, this is just this that in the human being a part of God lives, which is of the same kind and being as the whole godhead, as well as the handful of water is of the same kind as the whole encompassing ocean. As the water in the hand and the water in the sea are of the same kind and being, also that which lives in the soul is of the same kind and being as God. Therefore, we call heavenly what is inside of the human being, and we call the wisdom divine wisdom or theosophy which the human being can investigate in his innermost core.

This is a thought process which everybody would have to admit if he wanted to think only logically. Often someone objects to theosophy: you demand that the human being goes through a development. However, not everybody is able to verify everything the theosophy maintains.—Somebody who understands the matters will never maintain that any human being if he can have only the necessary patience, force and endurance cannot get to that condition which single human beings have got in the course of human development. But something else is in the so-called proofs of theosophical truths. Something is to be found in the theosophical literature and in theosophical talks or can be heard, otherwise, somewhere within the theosophical movement about which somebody who has a modern education says to himself: these are assertions. One can accept them, but no theosophist does prove them; he just maintains them.—This speaking of proofs is something that appears over and over again that one objects to theosophy over and over again. How is it?—It behaves as follows.

What theosophy spreads as a higher spiritual wisdom can be investigated if those forces which slumber in every human soul are woken. These forces and abilities, which we call the forces and abilities of the seer, of the spiritual beholding, are necessary to investigate the matters. If one wants to investigate, to discover the facts of the spiritual world, these abilities and forces are necessary. However, it is something different to understand what the spiritual researcher has found. Mind you, one needs the forces of the seer to find the spiritual truths, but that one only needs the clear, logical human mind going up to the last consequences to understand them.

That is essential. Someone who states that he cannot understand what theosophy maintains has not yet thought enough about it. On the contrary, we can better understand what science maintains today. Just what we understand, if we stop at true science, about the facts of nature, about the matters of the apparently lifeless and of the living nature—even if we take the facts of the history of civilisation—if we want to understand them, we can never understand them if we approach them only with the materialistic scholarship which is nothing else than materialistic fantasy. We can understand what true science delivers to us if we know the true science of the spiritual world. To somebody who sees deeper science as it is presented by Ernst Haeckel, for example, becomes only understandable if one has theosophy as a precondition, as a basis.

A comparison should make clear what I want to say. Imagine that you have a picture before yourselves which shows any scene, any saint’s legend. You can try to understand this picture in double way. Once you place yourselves before the picture and try to let revive in your soul what has lived in the soul of the painter. You try to rouse in your soul what the picture shows as spiritual contents. Something lives in it that raises your soul, makes it lofty, and invigorates it. However, you can still react differently to this picture. You can go and say that this does not interest you. Also what the painter has imagined does not interest you particularly. However, you want to get to know how he mixed the paints which substances are mixed in the paint which he painted on the canvas. You want to test how this is there on the canvas, how much of the red and green paints were used where straight and where crooked lines were applied.

These are two different approaches to a picture. It would be brainless to say about the one: you look at something that is false.—No, he looks at something that is absolutely true. He looks how the paint sticks to the canvas and how it is composed. He looks whether and how the paints have cracked et cetera. This can be real truth. Then there the other comes and says to the first: this is not the right thing what you think. This is only a thought. You can objectively find what I investigate.

I want to give an additional example, so that we understand each other precisely. Somebody plays a sonata on a piano. You listen to this sonata with musical ear; you indulge in the marvellous realm of sounds which this sonata delivers to you. This is a way how you can investigate what takes place here. However, another way could also be the following. Anybody comes there and says that this does not interest him which one hears with the musical ear. But there stands a piano, in it strings are stretched. These strings move. I want to hang up little paper tabs on these strings. They jump off if the string moves and thereby I can study where the strings move and where they are in rest. I want to completely refrain from that which you hear there with your ear. One cannot prove that objectively.

As well as this second viewer behaves to the first viewer; the characterised scholars behave to the theosophists. No theosophist thinks of denying scholarship. Just as little as that who goes into raptures about the spiritual contents of a picture says that that is not true which the other investigates about the paints, just as little that who has a musical ear will say that that is not true which the other investigates with the little paper tabs—because it is true, it is true what the naturalist investigates about his material. Nothing should be argued against it. But that escapes these natural sciences which is essential in the world process. Just as that which is essential escapes somebody who looks only at the little paper tabs and what also escapes somebody who only investigates the paint and maybe still the material, the canvas.

Then some people come and say: there is something subjective, this lives only in the soul and cannot be proven objectively. One has to investigate what can be really found. Outside only the oscillatory etheric matter, the oscillatory substance exists. Indeed. One answers as a theosophist to such people: if you only investigate the matter, you only find your matter outside, as well as that who blocked his ears can only find what one can see in the little paper tabs.

Still a few years ago one got up the objectivity of science to mischief. It is this the so-called atomistic theory where one calls that subjective which the human being perceives as sensory sensation what he perceives as sound, colour et cetera, and traces it back to objective processes. These processes should be oscillations of any substance. At that time—as an example—one called it always only red. Red, one said, is only in your eye. Outside in space is nothing else than an oscillation of the ether of so and so many millions oscillations.—This pseudoscience, which is no longer science but religion, transformed the world of perception into a huge sum of atoms which are in oscillatory movements.

This nonsense of transforming everything that we experience as colour-fresh and lively contents into abstract processes which are nothing else than calculated things, nothing else than results of brooding and speculation, this nonsense lately withdraws somewhat. We see that already the atom and its oscillatory movement is regarded by reasonable naturalists only as a calculation approach and in the better circles of thinkers one does no longer take care of the inaccuracy of the atomic hypotheses et cetera. But it has collected in the brains of the human beings to look at the world as an objective nothing, as only materialistic oscillation processes, so that it has penetrated the theosophical movement and theosophy itself in the first years. We had to experience that the most spiritual movement was severely infected by materialism. We had to experience that one could read in the most different theosophical books over and over again that this is this or that vibration. In particular the English books did not get tired to talk about vibrations.

It is a characteristic of our time that this materialistic tendency could come into the most spiritual movement. We still have much to do for long time to overcome this childhood disease of theosophy. However, only if the time has come when within theosophy one no longer speaks about moving atoms, then that cleverly thought-out construction of monads has disappeared which whirl down from the heights and take in everything—an absurd materialistic idea.

One has to realise that theosophy concerns the recognition of the spiritual as such and one has to be aware of the fact that one lets the materialistic science have the swinging little paper tabs and lets it investigate the paints and the canvas. Theosophy deals with the development of the higher senses, the knowledge of the higher senses, it includes what the human being sees, summarises, surveys with the higher soul forces, and what he hears with the musical ear—the swinging string expresses it spatially. If you have understood this, you know to some extent what theosophy is.

Hence, we have also to completely renounce to believe that a kind of harmony is possible between the modern scholarship and theosophy. It is not possible.—This harmony only comes if scholarship itself has progressed so far that it can understand theosophy. Indeed, we have to do it with the chemical investigation of the paints, with the investigation of the lines, with the investigation of the canvas, with the investigation of the little paper tabs on the moved strings, but this does not exclude that with the higher development of the spiritual forces the higher spiritual is revealed to us in that which we investigate externally. The modern scholarship is far away from understanding this matter.

One becomes mild towards this scholarship if one sees, for example, that somebody who has been born out of this scholarship cannot understand anything that is scholarly in the deepest sense and has originated from spiritual science at the same time. I know that I say something extremely offensive for many listeners who have learnt physics. But it is something symptomatic about which I have to speak. Which physicist would not disparage what one calls Goethe’s theory of colours. It is a matter of impossibility to speak about it, but times will come—and they are not far , when one recognises the objections against Goethe's theory of colours as outdated prejudices. You can read further details about Goethe’s theory of colours in my book about Goethe’s World View.

Goethe’s theory of colours was born out of a spiritual world view and for that who can understand this, this theory of colours is the proof of Goethe’s deep thinking. But it does not start from the prejudice that colour is an oscillatory ether. It stands rather on a ground which can be circumscribed as I try it now. I ask you to follow me in my subtle thought process. If anybody sees the red colour outside, his eye sees red at first. Now there comes the physicist and says: this red colour is only subjective. This is a process in space or in the brain. However, what is real outside is nothing but an oscillatory movement of the ether.

If now anybody comes who says: what you see there is only an oscillatory movement of the ether, then reply the following: try to imagine this oscillatory movement of the ether. Is this colourless? It must be colourless, because you want to explain the colour from the oscillations. Hence, what is outside must be colourless. Then I ask: does it still have maybe other qualities; does it maybe have the quality of heat? There the physicist answers: heat even comes from oscillatory movement. However, these people are funniest if they say: these oscillations do not have sensory qualities, but only those qualities which we can think.

If one regards now that which the senses say as subjective, one must also regard that which one thinks as subjective. Then one must also say: what you have calculated there as an oscillatory nebulous mass is subjective all the more, is never perceived, but is only calculated. Everything is calculated subjectively. Who realises that that which we experience in ourselves is objective and that the objective can become the most subjective has a right to speak about the fact that also the calculated has an objective existence. He also does not regard red and green, C sharp and G as only subjective phenomena.

Now I have said a number of matters which are dreadful heresies to scientifically thinking people. One talks a lot that times have changed. Yes, times have changed since Giordano Bruno. At his time the dogma of infallibility was not yet valid. Today the dogma of infallibility is valid, as you know, in certain Catholic circles. But this dogma of infallibility is not born only out of Catholicism. It came into being as an external law, as an external dogma. However, the infallibility dogma also lives as an attitude in the minds of the materialistically thinking, monistic freethinkers. They regard themselves—I do not say that everybody regards himself as a little pope—but as so infallible that they regard everything as superstitious that does not come from their circles. If one counters these infallible physicists and psychiatrists—they do not say that they are infallible, but one feels it , then he is dismissed. He is no longer burnt, but he is made a fool with the means which is trendy today.

The theosophist does not necessarily look for approval. Compared with truth approval is something indifferent. Who has understood the truth of a mathematical theorem does not care whether a million people agree or not. Truth is not decided by majority. Someone who has recognised a truth has recognised it and needs no approval. Thus the theosophical movement prefers the careful supporters. It does not want to have children but such human beings who form a judgement, with all care, after the most profound examination. The demand to be careful is something that gives me the deepest sympathy.

From that which I have tried to show you can infer that theosophy is far away to criticise the contemporary scholarship. Should the theosophist fight against it? He would do something very foolish, because it would be as if that who looks at a picture with displeasure wanted to fight against somebody who studies the chemical composition of the paints. If, for example, an appearance like Ernst Haeckel is defended from theosophical side, this does not need to be wrong. One can defend him if one recognises him from a higher point of view sees how he appears there and knows how to classify the matters in the world evolution. The theosophist is able to give the right position to the contemporary development in any field.

Thus the relation of the newly arising spiritual current is which tries to look at the world in such a way as single extraordinary spirits looked always at it. But it was not possible during the last centuries to give this spiritual science as it was given once. What one calls theosophy today is a small part of encompassing world wisdom, of occult science. This is something that has always existed with extraordinary human individualities since millennia, even since there are human beings. In the form, however, as single great spirits have owned it, it could not been given to the big mass. Nevertheless, it was not withheld from the big mass.

If you check the legends and myths of the nations impartially, you see that these legends and myths are the metaphorical expressions of a science which contains more wisdom than the present-day science offers. This science would regard it as fantasy if one said that wisdom is in these fairy tales. This world wisdom has been announced in the most different religions; depending on how the one or the other people needed it according to its temperament and the climate. If we have an overview of everything that was given to humankind in the most different forms, we are led to a common core, to encompassing world wisdom. Today not everything can be already handed over to the bigger part of humankind, because somebody who rises toward this world wisdom has to go through particular inner ordeals. This world wisdom can be handed over only to somebody who goes through these ordeals. In former times also the elementary part was handed over only in the closest circle to well prepared pupils with the corresponding intellectual, moral and mental qualities. There are even today persons who regard it as wrong to deliver the occult profundities by theosophy to the big mass of the human beings. However, the reproach is unfounded because there is no alternative today. Who understands the structure of the spirit of the present age knows that inner truth and wisdom of the religious world view feel alienated because one can no longer understand them.

This was different once. Then the wisdom which is announced today by theosophy was the property of the single human being. One gave the big mass the appropriate wisdom in pictures. The feeling nature of the big mass was suited to take it up in the pictures. The big mass could live with these pictures only. Truth was in the religions, truth was in the basic religious views. Theosophy only makes this clear again to us in the deepest way. The human being could understand it with his feeling in ancient times. Our time demands that he can also understand what is contained in the religions.

Thus occult science is forced to come out a little bit, to contribute something to the verification of the religions, to give the elementary part of spiritual truth at least. A time would be dreary and desolate if humankind were alienated from all knowledge of the spiritual worlds and from any relation to them. Only that who does not understand the case can believe that humankind could exist without relation to the spiritual, without belief in spirit and immortality. Like the plant needs food juices, the soul needs something spiritual that forms its basis. Theosophy does not want to found a new religion. But it wants to bring truth home to the human being again in a form which is suited to the modern human being, in the form of thinking comprehension. Thus theosophy brings the old truth in new form to our contemporaries, unperturbed by those who, going out from the materialistic superstition, turn against this spiritual current.

As well as the external natural science rests upon that which it investigates and calculates with the help of the microscope and telescope, theosophy uses the most significant instrument of which Goethe speaks: what the skilled ear of the musician is, this is the human soul compared with all tools , and further:

Nature, mysterious in day’s clear light,
lets none remove her veil,
and what she won’t discover to your understanding
you can’t extort from her with levers and with screws.

Faust I, verses 672–675

Who understands the world is the most perfect instrument, and supported on the spiritual beholding theosophy will produce such instruments more and more.

The answer to the question: what do our scholars know about the real basis of theosophy is: nothing.—They can know nothing because all their ways of thinking can bring them to nothing else than to look at theosophy as a fantastic stuff. Who has understood, however, that scholarship cannot get involved in theosophy, which has gone out from quite different bases, also understands that this scholarship will be in need to illuminate the structure of spirit more intensely. This scholarship provides such flowers. But a real comprehension of the soul only can make such things comprehensible, which the modern scholarship knows.

Or: what has somebody to think who regarded Goethe, Schopenhauer, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and others as great spirits if this materialistic scholarship has brought it so far that you can find in a little book about Goethe’s illness, about Schopenhauer’s illness—also in other works—these illnesses considered from the point of view of the materialistic psychiatry? One calls a particular type of insanity manic depression, schizophrenia another, and paranoia a third one. These three forms of insanity are taken to show that one can also find symptoms of insanities with the great spirits who are regarded as leaders of humankind. One found the symptoms of manic depression with Schopenhauer, paranoia with Tasso, Rousseau and others. Indeed, the same author has called an even bigger number of people feeble-minded. He is the author of the book On the Physiological Idiocy of Women which concerns one half of the whole humankind. It would be easy to consider the author from his own viewpoint and to scrutinise him.—However, one must not laugh at these matters. The materialistic science must get to this because these are partial truths. But one can get only to the right insight if one sees the spirit working behind it. Then one sees that often a higher spiritual development must be purchased for the same symptoms, as on the other side health for other symptoms. One is able to do this only if one explains them from the theosophical standpoint.

I would like to tell something else. You know that I have pointed to ancient times of development when our civilisation did not yet exist when there has been a continent between this Europe and America, the continent of the old Atlantis. I have already pointed to the fact that this Atlantis has been found again by the naturalists. In the magazine Kosmos, 10th issue, a naturalist speaks of animals and plants which lived on this Atlantis. Indeed, such a naturalist admits this, but he does not admit that other human beings lived in those days. He does not admit that the old Atlantean land was covered by a wide nebulous sea that the ground was not covered by such an air as it forms our atmosphere today, that the expression which the old Central European peoples have in their myths: Niflheim, nebulous home, means something real that our Atlantean ancestors lived in a nebulous country. I have sometimes pointed to that.

Few days ago a lecture was held in a famous society of naturalists in which was pointed out to the fact that most probably in the time of our Atlantean ancestors on the earth very large land masses were covered with fog. One concludes this speculatively from different other phenomena. Above all, it is pointed out to the fact that the plants, which need sunshine which grow in the desert, are of a later date and did not yet exist at that time, while those, which need little sunshine which could exist at Niflheim, the nebulous home, are the older ones.

Here you see that natural science lagging behind says to you what theosophy has said before. We have a time ahead when also the other matters must be gradually admitted by these natural sciences. Theosophy does not have to get used to the fantastic, objective atomic theories, but the facts which theosophy announces from the higher standpoint will be proven by the external natural sciences. This is the course of the future development. Even if the modern scholars know nothing about it, their own progress leads them to it.—No thinker should doubt that one can see more, can behold more with a developed soul than with mere senses and mere intellect.

It is the recognition of the developed human being as the most perfect instrument to investigate the world—theosophy wants this to be accepted. Everything else results automatically. If you say that the human being has reached the highest levels and will not keep on developing, then you do not need theosophy. If you say, however, the laws which have held sway in the past, will also hold sway in the future, single human beings have always stood higher than others of their surroundings—if you admit this, then you have already a theosophical attitude, in principle. One does not become a theosophist because one uses the words theosophy, brotherliness, unity et cetera. Brotherliness is something that all good people understand.

If I see people always talking about brotherliness and then also behold them feeling an inner lust if they talk about brotherliness, harmony, unity, then I always think of the oven and the first principle of the Theosophical Society which demands to establish the core of a general human fraternisation. It is for nothing if one says to the oven: dear oven, heat the room and make it warm.—If one wants that the oven gives off heat, then one must put heating material into it and kindle it. One must put heating material into it. This is the spiritual force, the ability to behold on account of the development of the higher worlds. By the development of the spiritual world that truth and wisdom in the human souls take place which must lead as wisdom and knowledge automatically to the general human brotherhood. Then we arrive at that which is expressed in the first principle of the theosophical program if the human being can be an instrument to behold into the spiritual worlds. If the organs of perception concealed in the human being are got out of the soul, theosophy is a progress which one is able to pursue. If one compares this theosophical attitude with the attitude of theosophists, of great, lofty personalities who lived in prehistoric time, then we find it also in a sentence from Herder’s pen: our tender, feeling and sensitive nature has developed all senses which God has given it. It cannot do without them, because that which results from the whole use of the organs shines to all. These are the vowels of life and so on.

Even if we only take the external physical senses into consideration, we can say in the theosophical sense, nevertheless: the physical and spiritual senses must be developed, because by the harmony of the spiritual and physical organs of perception the vowels not only of life, but also those of the eternal, infinite, spiritual life are kindled.

You read in Goethe’s poem The Secrets:

From the power which ties all beings
escapes that human being
who overcomes himself.

The human being is neither free nor not free, he is developing.

Notes:

Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), German philosopher

Eduard Oscar Schmidt (1823–1886), German zoologist. Goethes Verhältnis zu den organischen Wissenschaften (1853), Descendenzlehre und Darwinismus—The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism (1873)

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898)), Swiss poet and historical novelist

manic depression: Steiner uses the obsolete term “zirkuläres Irresein” (circular insanity, French: folie circulaire). This form of insanity is today called manic depression or bipolar disorder.

author of the book On the Physiological Idiocy of Women: Paul Julius Möbius (1853–1907), German neurologist. Über das Pathologische bei Goethe (1898). Über Schopenhauer (1899)

Atlantis: cf. R. Steiner CW 11 Cosmic Memory

Kosmos: Theodor Arldt (1878–1960), German geographer. Das Atlantisproblem

[ 1 ] The information given in the following chapters constitutes steps in an esoteric training, the name and character of which will be understood by all who apply this information in the right way. It refers to the three stages through which the training of the spiritual life leads to a certain degree of initiation. But only so much will here be explained as can be publicly imparted. These are merely indications extracted from a still deeper and more intimate doctrine. In esoteric training itself a quite definite course of instruction is followed. Certain exercises enable the soul to attain to a conscious intercourse with the spiritual world. These exercises bear about the same relation to what will be imparted in the following pages, as the instruction given in a higher strictly disciplined school bears to the incidental training. But impatient dabbling, devoid of earnest perseverance, can lead to nothing at all. The study of Spiritual Science can only be successful if the student retain what has already been indicated in the preceding chapter, and on the basis of this proceed further.

[ 2 ] The three stages which the above-mentioned tradition specifies, are as follows: (1) preparation; (2) enlightenment; (3) initiation. It is not altogether necessary that the first of these three stages should be completed before the second can be begun, nor that the second, in turn, be completed before the third be started. In certain respects it is possible to partake of enlightenment, and even of initiation, and in other respects still be in the preparatory stage. Yet it will be necessary to spend a certain time in the stage of preparation before any enlightenment can begin; and, at least in some respects, enlightenment must be completed before it is even possible to enter upon the stage of initiation. But in describing them it is necessary, for the sake of clarity, that the three stages be made to follow in order.

Preparation

[ 3 ] Preparation consists in a strict and definite cultivation of the life of thought and feeling, through which the psycho-spiritual body becomes equipped with higher senses and organs of activity in the same way that natural forces have fitted the physical body with organs built out of indeterminate living matter.

[ 4 ] To begin with, the attention of the soul is directed to certain events in the world that surrounds us. Such events are, on the one hand, life that is budding, growing, and flourishing, and on the other hand, all phenomena connected with fading, decaying, and withering. The student can observe these events simultaneously, wherever he turns his eyes and on every occasion they naturally evoke in him feelings and thoughts; but in ordinary circumstances he does not devote himself sufficiently to them. He hurries on too quickly from impression to impression. It is necessary, therefore, that he should fix his attention intently and consciously upon these phenomena. Wherever he observes a definite kind of blooming and flourishing, he must banish everything else from his soul, and entirely surrender himself, for a short time, to this one impression. He will soon convince himself that a feeling which heretofore in a similar case, would merely have flitted through his soul, now swells out and assumes a powerful and energetic form. He must now allow this feeling to reverberate quietly within himself while keeping inwardly quite still. He must cut himself off from the outer world, and simply and solely follow what his soul tells him of this blossoming and flourishing.

[ 5 ] Yet it must not be thought that much progress can be made if the senses are blunted to the world. First look at the things as keenly and as intently as you possibly can; then only let the feeling which expands to life, and the thought which arises in the soul, take possession of you. The point is that the attention should be directed with perfect inner balance upon both phenomena. If the necessary tranquility be attained and you surrender yourself to the feeling which expands to life in the soul, then, in due time, the following experience will ensue. Thoughts and feelings of a new kind and unknown before will be noticed uprising in the soul. Indeed, the more often the attention be fixed alternately upon something growing, blossoming and flourishing, and upon something else that is fading and decaying, the more vivid will these feelings become. And just as the eyes and ears of the physical body are built by natural forces out of living matter, so will the organs of clairvoyance build themselves out of the feelings and thoughts thus evoked. A quite definite form of feeling is connected with growth and expansion, and another equally definite with all that is fading and decaying. But this is only the case if the effort be made to cultivate these feelings in the way indicated. It is possible to describe approximately what these feelings are like. A full conception of them is within the reach of all who undergo these inner experiences.

If the attention be frequently fixed on the phenomena of growing, blooming and flourishing, a feeling remotely allied to the sensation of a sunrise will ensue, while the phenomena of fading and decaying will produce an experience comparable, in the same way, to the slow rising of the moon on the horizon. Both these feelings are forces which, when duly cultivated and developed to ever increasing intensity, lead to the most significant spiritual results. A new world is opened to the student if he systematically and deliberately surrenders himself to such feelings. The soul-world, the so-called astral plane, begins to dawn upon him. Growth and decay are no longer facts which make indefinite impressions on him as of old, but rather they form themselves into spiritual lines and figures of which he had previously suspected nothing. And these lines and figures have, for the different phenomena, different forms. A blooming flower, an animal in the process of growth, a tree that is decaying, evoke in his soul different lines. The soul world (astral plane) broadens out slowly before him. These lines and figures are in no sense arbitrary. Two students who have reached the corresponding stage of development will always see the same lines and figures under the same conditions. Just as a round table will be seen as round by two normal persons, and not as round by one and square by the other, so too, at the sight of a flower, the same spiritual figure is presented to the soul. And just as the forms of animals and plants are described in ordinary natural history, so too, the spiritual scientist describes or draws the spiritual forms of the process of growth and decay, according to species and kind.

[ 6 ] If the student has progressed so far that he can perceive the spiritual forms of those phenomena which are physically visible to his external sight, he is then not far from the stage where he will behold things which have no physical existence, and which therefore remain entirely hidden (occult) from those who have not received suitable instruction and training.

[ 7 ] It should be emphasized that the student must never lose himself in speculations on the meaning of one thing or another. Such intellectualizing will only draw him away from the right road. He should look out on the world with keen, healthy senses and quickened power of observation, and then give himself up to the feeling that arises within him. He should not try to make out, through intellectual speculation, the meaning of things, but rather allow the things to disclose themselves. It should be remarked that artistic feeling, when coupled with a quiet introspective nature, forms the best preliminary condition for the development of spiritual faculties. This feeling pierces through the superficial aspect of things, and in so doing touches their secrets.

[ 8 ] A further point of importance is what spiritual science calls orientation in the higher worlds. This is attained when the student is permeated, through and through, with the conscious realization that feelings and thoughts are just as much veritable realities as are tables and chairs in the world of the physical senses. In the soul and thought world, feelings and thoughts react upon each other just as do physical objects in the physical world. As long as the student is not vividly permeated with this consciousness, he will not believe that a wrong thought in his mind may have as devastating an effect upon other thoughts that spread life in the thought world as the effect wrought by a bullet fired at random upon the physical objects it hits. He will perhaps never allow himself to perform a physically visible action which he considers to be wrong, though he will not shrink from harboring wrong thoughts and feelings, for these appear harmless to the rest of the world. There can be no progress, however, on the path to higher knowledge unless we guard our thoughts and feelings in just the same way we guard out steps in the physical world. If we see a wall before us, we do not attempt to dash right through it, but turn aside. In other words, we guide ourselves by the laws of the physical world. There are such laws, too, for the soul and thought world, only they cannot impose themselves on us from without. They must flow out of the life of the soul itself. This can be attained if we forbid ourselves to harbor wrong thoughts and feelings. All arbitrary flitting to and fro in thought, all accidental ebbing and flowing of emotion must be forbidden in the same way. In so doing we do not become deficient in feeling. On the contrary, if we regulate our inner life in this way, we shall soon find ourselves becoming rich in feelings and creative with genuine imagination. In the place of petty emotionalism and capricious flights of thought, there appear significant emotions and thoughts that are fruitful. Feelings and thoughts of this kind lead the student to orientation in the spiritual world. He gains a right position in relation to the things of the spiritual world; a distinct and definite result comes into effect in his favor. Just as he, as a physical man, finds his way among physical things, so, too, his path now leads him between growth and decay, which he has already come to know in the way described above. On the one hand, he follows all processes of growing and flourishing and, on the other, of withering and decaying in a way that is necessary for his own and the world's advancement.

[ 9 ] The student has also to bestow a further care on the world of sound. He must discriminate between sounds that are produced by the so-called inert (lifeless) bodies, for instance, a bell, or a musical instrument, or a falling mass, and those which proceed from a living creature (an animal or a human being.) When a bell is struck, we hear the sound and connect a pleasant feeling with it; but when we hear the cry of an animal, we can, besides our own feeling, detect through it the manifestation of an inward experience of the animal, whether of pleasure or pain. It is with the latter kind of sound that the student sets to work. He must concentrate his whole attention on the fact that the sound tells him of something that lies outside his own soul. He must immerse himself in this foreign thing. He must closely unite his own feeling with the pleasure or pain of which the sound tells him. He must get beyond the point of caring whether, for him, the sound is pleasant or unpleasant, agreeable or disagreeable, and his soul must be filled with whatever is occurring in the being from which the sound proceeds. Through such exercises, if systematically and deliberately performed, the student will develop within himself the faculty of intermingling, as it were, with the being from which the sound proceeds. A person sensitive to music will find it easier than one who is unmusical to cultivate his inner life in this way; but no one should suppose that a mere sense for music can take the place of this inner activity. The student must learn to feel in this way in the face of the whole of nature. This implants a new faculty in his world of thought and feeling. Through her resounding tones, the whole of nature begins to whisper her secrets to the student. What was hitherto merely incomprehensible noise to his soul becomes by this means a coherent language of nature. And whereas hitherto he only heard sound from the so-called inanimate objects, he now is aware of a new language of the soul. Should he advance further in this inner culture, he will soon learn that he can hear what hitherto he did not even surmise. He begins to hear with the soul.

[ 10 ] To this, one thing more must be added before the highest point in this region can be attained. Of very great importance for the development of the student is the way in which he listens to others when they speak. He must accustom himself to do this in such a way that, while listening, his inner self is absolutely silent. If someone expresses an opinion and another listens, assent or dissent will, generally speaking, stir in the inner self of the listener. Many people in such cases feel themselves impelled to an expression of their assent, or more especially, of their dissent. In the student, all such assent or dissent must be silenced. It is not imperative that he should suddenly alter his way of living by trying to attain at all times to this complete inner silence. He will have to begin by doing so in special cases, deliberately selected by himself. Then quite slowly and by degrees, this new way of listening will creep into his habits, as of itself. In spiritual research this is systematically practiced. The student feels it his duty to listen, by way of practice, at certain times to the most contradictory views and, at the same time, bring entirely to silence all assent, and more especially, all adverse criticism. The point is that in so doing, not only all purely intellectual judgment be silenced, but also all feelings of displeasure, denial, or even assent. The student must at all times be particularly watchful lest such feelings, even when not on the surface, should still lurk in the innermost recess of the soul. He must listen, for example, to the statements of people who are, in some respects, far beneath him, and yet while doing so suppress every feeling of greater knowledge or superiority. It is useful for everyone to listen in this way to children, for even the wisest can learn incalculably much from children. The student can thus train himself to listen to the words of others quite selflessly, completely shutting down his own person and his opinions and way of feeling. When he practices listening without criticism, even when a completely contradictory opinion is advanced, when the most hopeless mistake is committed before him, he then learns, little by little, to blend himself with the being of another and become identified with it. Then he hears through the words into the soul of the other. Through continued exercise of this kind, sound becomes the right medium for the perception of soul and spirit. Of course it implies the very strictest self-discipline, but the latter leads to a high goal. When these exercises are practiced in connection with the other already given, dealing with the sounds of nature, the soul develops a new sense of hearing. She is now able to perceive manifestations from the spiritual world which do not find their expression in sounds perceptible to the physical ear. The perception of the “inner word” awakens. Gradually truths reveal themselves to the student from the spiritual world. He hears speech uttered to him in a spiritual way. Only to those who, by selfless listening, train themselves to be really receptive from within, in stillness, unmoved by personal opinion or feeling only to such can the higher beings speak of whom spiritual science tells. As long as one hurls any personal opinion or feeling against the speaker to whom one must listen, the beings of the spiritual world remain silent.

All higher truths are attained through such inwardly instilled speech, and what we hear from the lips of a true spiritual teacher has been experienced by him in this manner. But this does not mean that it is unimportant for us to acquaint ourselves with the writings of spiritual science before we can ourselves hear such inwardly instilled speech. On the contrary, the reading of such writings and the listening to the teachings of spiritual science are themselves means of attaining personal knowledge. Every sentence of spiritual science we hear is of a nature to direct the mind to the point which must be reached before the soul can experience real progress. To the practice of all that has here been indicated must be added the ardent study of what the spiritual researchers impart to the world. In all esoteric training such study belongs to the preparatory period, and all other methods will prove ineffective if due receptivity for the teachings of the spiritual researcher is lacking. For since these instructions are culled from the living inner word, from the living inwardly instilled speech, they are themselves gifted with spiritual life. They are not mere words; they are living powers. And while you follow the words of one who knows, while you read a book that springs from real inner experience, powers are at work in your soul which make you clairvoyant, just as natural forces have created out of living matter your eyes and your ears.

Enlightenment

[ 11 ] Enlightenment proceeds from very simple processes. Here, too, it is a matter of developing certain feelings and thoughts which slumber in every human being and must be awakened. It is only when these simple processes are carried out with unfailing patience, continuously and conscientiously, that they can lead to the perception of the inner light-forms. The first step is taken by observing different natural objects in a particular way; for instance, a transparent and beautifully formed stone (a crystal), a plant, and an animal. The student should endeavor, at first, to direct his whole attention to a comparison of the stone with the animal in the following manner. The thoughts here mentioned should pass through his soul accompanied by vivid feelings, and no other thought, no other feeling, must mingle with them and disturb what should be an intensely attentive observation. The student says to himself: “The stone has a form; the animal also has a form. The stone remains motionless in its place. The animal changes its place. It is instinct (desire) which causes the animal to change its place. Instincts, too, are served by the form of the animal. Its organs and limbs are fashioned in accordance with these instincts. The form of the stone is not fashioned in accordance with desires, but in accordance with desireless force.” (The fact here mentioned, in its bearing on the contemplation of crystals, is in many ways distorted by those who have only heard of it in an outward, exoteric manner, and in this way such practices as crystal-gazing have their origin. Such manipulations are based on a misunderstanding. They have been described in many books, but they never form the subject of genuine esoteric teaching.)

By sinking deeply into such thoughts, and while doing so, observing the stone and the animal with rapt attention, there arise in the soul two quite separate kinds of feelings. From the stone there flows into the soul the one kind of feeling, and from the animal the other kind. The attempt will probably not succeed at first, but little by little, with genuine and patient practice, these feelings ensue. Only, this exercise must be practiced over and over again. At first the feelings are only present as long as the observation lasts. Later on they continue, and then they grow to something which remains living in the soul. The student has then but to reflect, and both feelings will always arise, even without the contemplation of an external object. Out of these feelings and the thoughts that are bound up with them, the organs of clairvoyance are formed. If the plant should then be included in this observation, it will be noticed that the feeling flowing from it lies between the feelings derived from the stone and the animal, in both quality and degree. The organs thus formed are spiritual eyes. The students gradually learns, by their means, to see something like soul and spirit colors. The spiritual world with its lines and figures remains dark as long as he has only attained what has been described as preparation; through enlightenment this world becomes light. Here it must also be noted that the words “dark” and “light,” as well as the other expressions used, only approximately describe what is meant. This cannot be otherwise if ordinary language is used, for this language was created to suit physical conditions. Spiritual science describes that which, for clairvoyant organs, flows from the stone, as blue, or blue-red; and that which is felt as coming from the animal as red or red-yellow. In reality, colors of a spiritual kind are seen. The color proceeding the plant is green which little by little turns into a light ethereal pink. The plant is actually that product of nature which in higher worlds resembles, in certain respects, its constitution in the physical world. The same does not apply to the stone and the animal. It must now be clearly understood that the above-mentioned colors only represent the principal shades in the stone, plant and animal kingdom. In reality, all possible intermediate shades are present. Every stone, every plant, every animal has its own particular shade of color. In addition to these there are also the beings of the higher worlds who never incarnate physically, but who have their colors, often wonderful, often horrible. Indeed, the wealth of color in these higher worlds is immeasurably greater than in the physical world.

[ 12 ] Once the faculty of seeing with spiritual eyes has been acquired, one then encounters sooner or later the beings here mentioned, some of them higher, some lower than man himself--beings that never enter physical reality.

If this point has been reached, the way to a great deal lies open. But it is inadvisable to proceed further without paying careful heed to what is said or otherwise imparted by the spiritual researcher. And for that, too, which has been described, attention paid to such experienced guidance is the very best thing. Moreover, if a man has the strength and the endurance to travel so far that he fulfills the elementary conditions of enlightenment, he will assuredly seek and find the right guidance.

[ 13 ] But in any circumstances, one precaution is necessary, failing which it were better to leave untrodden all steps on the path to higher knowledge. It is necessary that the student should lose none of his qualities as a good and noble man, or his receptivity for all physical reality. Indeed, throughout his training he must continually increase his moral strength, his inner purity, and his power of observation. To give an example: during the elementary exercises on enlightenment, the student must take care always to enlarge his sympathy for the animal and the human worlds, and his sense for the beauty of nature. Failing this care, such exercises would continually blunt that feeling and that sense; the heart would become hardened, and the senses blunted, and that could only lead to perilous results.

[ 14 ] How enlightenment proceeds if the student rises, in the sense of the foregoing exercises, from the stone, the plant, and the animal, up to man, and how, after enlightenment, under all circumstances the union of the soul with the spiritual world is effected, leading to initiation--with these things the following chapters will deal, in as far as they can and may do so.

[ 15 ] In our time the path to spiritual science is sought by many. It is sought in many ways, and many dangerous and even despicable practices are attempted. It is for this reason that they who claim to know something of the truth in these matters place before others the possibility of learning something of esoteric training. Only so much is here imparted as accords with this possibility. It is necessary that something of the truth should become known, in order to prevent error causing great harm. No harm can come to anyone following the way here described, so long as he does not force matters. Only, one thing should be noted: no student should spend more time and strength upon these exercises than he can spare with due regard to his station in life and to his duties; nor should he change anything, for the time being, in the external conditions of his life through taking this path. Without patience no genuine results can be attained. After doing an exercise for a few minutes, the student must be able to stop and continue quietly his daily work, and no thought of these exercises should mingle with the day's work. NO one is of use as an esoteric student or will ever attain results of real value who has not learned to wait in the highest and best sense of the word.

The Control of Thoughts and Feelings

[ 16 ] When the student seeks the path leading to higher knowledge in the way described in the preceding chapter, he should not omit to fortify himself; throughout his work, with one ever present thought. He must never cease repeating to himself that he may have made quite considerable progress after a certain interval of time, though it may not be apparent to him in the way he perhaps expected; otherwise he can easily lose heart and abandon all attempts after a short time. The powers and faculties to be developed are of a most subtle kind, and differ entirely in their nature from the conceptions previously formed by the student. He had been accustomed to occupy himself exclusively with the physical world; the world of spirit and soul had been concealed from his vision and concepts. It is therefore not surprising if he does not immediately notice the powers of soul and spirit now developing in him. In this respect there is a possibility of discouragement for those setting out on the path to higher knowledge, if they ignore the experience gathered by responsible investigators. The teacher is aware of the progress made by his pupil long before the latter is conscious of it He knows how the delicate spiritual eyes begin to form themselves long before the pupil is aware of this, and a great part of what he has to say is couched in such terms as to prevent the pupil from losing patience and perseverance before he can himself gain knowledge of his own progress. The teacher, as we know, can confer upon the pupil no powers which are not already latent within him, and his sole function is to assist in the awakening of slumbering faculties. But what he imparts out of his own experience is a pillar of strength for the one wishing to penetrate through darkness to light. [ 17 ] Many abandon the path to higher knowledge soon after having set foot upon it, because their progress is not immediately apparent to them. And even when the first experiences begin to dawn upon the pupil, he is apt to regard them as illusions, because he had formed quite different conceptions of what he was going to experience. He loses courage, either because he regards these first experiences as being of no value, or because they appear to him to be so insignificant that he cannot believe they will lead him to any appreciable results within a measurable time. Courage and self-confidence are two beacons which must never be extinguished on the path to higher knowledge. No one will ever travel far who cannot bring himself to repeat, over and over again, an exercise which has failed, apparently, for a countless number of times.

[ 18 ] Long before any distinct perception of progress, there rises in the student, from the hidden depths of the soul, a feeling that he is on the right path. This feeling should be cherished and fostered, for it can develop into a trustworthy guide. Above all, it is imperative to extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for the attainment of higher knowledge. It must be clearly realized that a start has to be made with the thoughts and feelings with which we continually live, and that these feelings and thoughts must merely be given a new direction. Everyone must say to himself: “In my own world of thought and feeling the deepest mysteries lie hidden, only hitherto I have been unable to perceive them.” In the end it all resolves itself into the fact that man ordinarily carries body, soul and spirit about with him, and yet is conscious in a true sense only of his body, and not of his soul and spirit. The student becomes conscious of soul and spirit, just as the ordinary person is conscious of his body. [ 19 ] Hence it is highly important to give the proper direction to thoughts and feelings, for then only can the perception be developed of all that is invisible in ordinary life. One of the ways by which this development may be carried out will now be indicated. Again, like almost everything else so far explained, it is quite a simple matter. Yet its results are of the greatest consequence, if the necessary devotion and sympathy be applied.

[ 20 ] Let the student place before himself the small seed of a plant, and while contemplating this insignificant object, form with intensity the right kind of thoughts, and through these thoughts develop certain feelings. In the first place let him clearly grasp what he really sees with his eyes. Let him describe to himself the shape, color and all other qualities of the seed. Then let his mind dwell upon the following train of thought: “Out of the seed, if planted in the soil, a plant of complex structure will grow.” Let him build up this plant in his imagination, and reflect as follows: “What I am now picturing to myself in my imagination will later on be enticed from the seed by the forces of earth and light. If I had before me an artificial object which imitated the seed to such a deceptive degree that my eyes could not distinguish it from a real seed, no forces of earth or light could avail to produce from it a plant.” If the student thoroughly grasps this thought so that it becomes an inward experience, he will also be able to form the following thought and couple it with the right feeling: “All that will ultimately grow out of the seed is now secretly enfolded within it as the force of the whole plant. In the artificial imitation of the seed there is no such force present. And yet both appear alike to my eyes. The real seed, therefore, contains something invisible which is not present in the imitation.” It is on this invisible something that thought and feeling are to be concentrated. (Anyone objecting that a microscopical examination would reveal the difference between the real seed and the imitation would only show that he had failed to grasp the point. The intention is not to investigate the physical nature of the object, but to use it for the development of psycho-spiritual forces.)

[ 21 ] Let the student fully realize that this invisible something will transmute itself later on into a visible plant, which he will have before him in its shape and color. Let him ponder on the thought: “The invisible will become visible. If I could not think, then that which will only become visible later on could not already make its presence felt to me.” Particular stress must be laid on the following point: what the student thinks he must also feel with intensity. In inner tranquility, the thought mentioned above must become a conscious inner experience, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and disturbances. And sufficient time must be taken to allow the thought and the feeling which is coupled with it to bore themselves into the soul, as it were. If this be accomplished in the right way, then after a time—possibly not until after numerous attempts—an inner force will make itself felt. This force will create new powers of perception. The grain of seed will appear as if enveloped in a small luminous cloud. In a sensible-supersensible way, it will be felt as a kind of flame. The center of this flame evokes the same feeling that one has when under the impression of the color lilac, and the edges as when under the impression of a bluish tone. What was formerly invisible now becomes visible, for it is created by the power of the thoughts and feelings we have stirred to life within ourselves. The plant itself will not become visible until later, so that the physically invisible now reveals itself in a spiritually visible way.

[ 22 ] It is not surprising that all this appears to many as illusion. “What is the use of such visions,” they ask, “and such hallucinations?” And many will thus fall away and abandon the path. But this is precisely the important point: not to confuse spiritual reality with imagination at this difficult stage of human evolution, and further-more, to have the courage to press onward and not become timorous and faint-hearted. On the other hand, however, the necessity must be emphasized of maintaining unimpaired and of perpetually cultivating that healthy sound sense which distinguishes truth from illusion. Fully conscious self-control must never be lost during all these exercises, and they must be accompanied by the same sane, sound thinking which is applied to the details of every-day life. To lapse into reveries would be fatal. The intellectual clarity, not to say the sobriety of thought, must never for a moment be dulled. The greatest mistake would be made if the student's mental balance were disturbed through such exercises, if he were hampered in judging the matters of his daily life as sanely and as soundly as before. He should examine himself again and again to find out if he has remained unaltered in relation to the circumstances among which he lives, or whether he may perhaps have become unbalanced. Above all, strict care must be taken not to drift at random into vague reveries, or to experiment with all kinds of exercises. The trains of thought here indicated have been tested and practiced in esoteric training since the earliest times, and only such are given in these pages. Anyone attempting to use others devised by himself, or of which he may have heard or read at one place or another, will inevitably go astray and find himself on the path of boundless chimera.

[ 23 ] As a further exercise to succeed the one just described, the following may be taken: Let the student place before him a plant which has attained the stage of full development. Now let him fill his mind with the thought that the time will come when this plant will wither and die. “Nothing will be left of what I now see before me. But this plant will have developed seeds which, in their turn, will develop to new plants. I again become aware that in what I see, something lies hidden which I cannot see. I fill my mind entirely with the thought: this plant with its form and colors, will in time be no more. But the reflection that it produces seeds teaches me that it will not disappear into nothing. I cannot at present see with my eyes that which guards it from disappearance, any more than I previously could discern the plant in the grain of seed. Thus there is something in the plant which my eyes cannot see. If I let this thought live within me, and if the corresponding feeling be coupled with it, then, in due time, there will again develop in my soul a force which will ripen into a new perception.” Out of the plant there again grows a kind of spiritual flame-form, which is, of course, correspondingly larger than the one previously described. The flame can be felt as being greenish-blue in the center, and yellowish-red at the outer edge.

[ 24 ] It must be explicitly emphasized that the colors here described are not seen as the physical eyes see colors, but that through spiritual perception the same feeling is experienced as in the case of a physical color-impression. To apprehend blue spiritually means to have a sensation similar to the one experienced when the physical eye rests on the color blue. This fact must be noted by all who intend to rise to spiritual perception. Otherwise they will expect a mere repetition of the physical in the spiritual. This could only lead to the bitterest deception.

[ 25 ] Anyone having reached this point of spiritual vision is the richer by a great deal, for he can perceive things not only in their present state of being but also in their process of growth and decay. He begins to see in all things the spirit, of which physical eyes can know nothing. And therewith he has taken the first step toward the gradual solution, through personal vision, of the secret of birth and death. For the outer senses a being comes into existence through birth, and passes away through death. This, however, is only because these senses cannot perceive the concealed spirit of the being. For the spirit, birth and death are merely a transformation, just as the unfolding of the flower from the bud is a transformation enacted before our physical eyes. But if we desire to learn this through personal vision we must first awaken the requisite spiritual sense in the way here indicated.

[ 26 ] In order to meet another objection, which may be raised by certain people who have some psychic experience, let it at once be admitted that there are shorter and simpler ways, and that there are persons who have acquired knowledge of the phenomena of birth and death through personal vision, without first going through all that has here been described. There are, in fact, people with considerable psychic gifts who need but a slight impulse in order to find themselves already developed. But they are the exceptions, and the methods described above are safer and apply equally to all. It is possible to acquire some knowledge of chemistry in an exceptional way, but if you wish to become a chemist you must follow the recognized and reliable course.

[ 27 ] An error fraught with serious consequences would ensue if it were assumed that the desired result could be reached more easily if the grain of seed or the plant mentioned above were merely imagined, were merely pictured in the imagination. This might lead to results, but not so surely as the method here. The vision thus attained would, in most cases, be a mere fragment of the imagination, the transformation of which into genuine spiritual vision would still remain to be accomplished. It is not intended arbitrarily to create visions, but to allow reality to create them within oneself. The truth must well up from the depths of our own soul; it must not be conjured forth by our ordinary ego, but by the beings themselves whose spiritual truth we are to contemplate.

[ 28 ] Once the student has found the beginnings of spiritual vision by means of such exercises, he may proceed to the contemplation of man himself. Simple phenomena of human life must first be chosen. But before making any attempt in this direction it is imperative for the student to strive for the absolute purity of his moral character. He must banish all through of ever using knowledge gained in this way for his own personal benefit. He must be convinced that he would never, under any circumstances, avail himself in an evil sense of any power he may gain over his fellow-creatures. For this reason, all who seek to discover through personal vision the secrets in human nature must follow the golden rule of true spiritual science. This golden rule is as follows: For every one step that you take in the pursuit of higher knowledge, take three steps in the perfection of your own character. If this rule is observed, such exercise as the following may be attempted:

[ 29 ] Recall to mind some person whom you may have observed when he was filled with desire for some object. Direct your attention to this desire. It is best to recall to memory that moment when the desire was at its height, and it was still uncertain whether the object of the desire would be attained. And now fill your mind with this recollection, and reflect on what you can thus observe. Maintain the utmost inner tranquility. Make the greatest possible effort to be blind and deaf to everything that may be going on around you, and take special heed that through the conception thus evoked a feeling should awaken in your soul. Allow this feeling to rise in your soul like a cloud on the cloudless horizon. As a rule, of course, your reflection will be interrupted, because the person whom it concerns was not observed in this particular state of soul for a sufficient length of time. The attempt will most likely fail hundreds and hundreds of times. It is just a question of not losing patience. After many attempts you will succeed in experiencing a feeling In your soul corresponding to the state of soul of the person observed, and you will begin to notice that through this feeling a power grows in your soul that leads to spiritual insight into the state of soul of the other. A picture experienced as luminous appears in your field of vision. This spiritually luminous picture is the so-called astral embodiment of the desire observed in that soul. Again the impression of this picture may be described as flame-like, yellowish-red in the center, and reddish-blue or lilac at the edges. Much depends on treating such spiritual experiences with great delicacy. The best thing is not to speak to anyone about them except to your teacher, if you have one. Attempted descriptions of such experiences in inappropriate words usually only lead to gross self-deception. Ordinary terms are employed which are not intended for such things, and are therefore too gross and clumsy. The consequence is that in the attempt to clothe the experience in words we are misled into blending the actual experience with all kinds of fantastic delusions. Here again is another important rule for the student: know how to observe silence concerning your spiritual experiences. Yes, observe silence even toward yourself. Do not attempt to clothe in words what you contemplate in the spirit, or to pore over it with clumsy intellect. Lend yourself freely and without reservation to these spiritual impressions, and do not disturb them by reflecting and pondering over them too much. For you must remember that your reasoning faculties are, to begin with, by no means equal to your new experience. You have acquired these reasoning faculties in a life hitherto confined to the physical world of the senses; the faculties you are now acquiring transcend this world. Do not try, therefore, to apply to the new and higher perceptions the standard of the old. Only he who has gained some certainty and steadiness in the observation of inner experiences can speak about them, and thereby stimulate his fellow-men.

[ 30 ] The exercise just described may be supplemented by the following: Direct your attention in the same way upon a person to whom the fulfillment of some wish, the gratification of some desire, has been granted. If the same rules and precautions be adopted as in the previous instance, spiritual insight will once more be attained. A spiritual insight will once more be attained. A spiritual flame-form will be distinguished, creating an impression of yellow in the center and green at the edges.

[ 31 ] By such observation of his fellow-creatures, the student may easily lapse into a moral fault. He may become cold-hearted. Every conceivable effort must be made to prevent this. Such observation should only be practiced by one who has already risen to the level on which complete certainty is found that thoughts are real things. He will then no longer allow himself to think of his fellow-men in a way that is incompatible with the highest reverence for human dignity and human liberty. The thought that a human being could be merely an object of observation must never for a moment be entertained. Self-education must see to it that this insight into human nature should go hand in hand with an unlimited respect for the personal privilege of each individual, and with the recognition of the sacred and inviolable nature of that which dwells in each human being. A feeling of reverential awe must fill us, even in our recollections.

[ 32 ] For the present, only these two examples can be given to show how enlightened insight into human nature may be achieved; they will at least serve to point out the way to be taken. By gaining the inner tranquility and repose indispensable for such observation, the student will have undergone a great inner transformation. He will then soon reach the point where this enrichment of his inner self will lend confidence and composure to his outward demeanor. And this transformation of his outward demeanor will again react favorably on his soul. Thus he will be able to help himself further along the road. He will find ways and means of penetrating more and more into the secrets of human nature which are hidden from our external senses, and he will then also become ripe for a deeper insight into the mysterious connections between human nature and all else that exists in the universe. By following this path the student approaches closer and closer to the moment when he can effectively take the first steps of initiation. But before these can be taken, one thing more is necessary, though at first its need will be least of all apparent; later on, however, the student will be convinced of it.

[ 33 ] The would-be initiate must bring with him a certain measure of courage and fearlessness. He must positively go out of his way to find opportunities for developing these virtues. His training should provide for their systematic cultivation. In this respect, life itself is a good school—possibly the best school. The student must learn to look danger calmly in the face and try to overcome difficulties unswervingly. For instance, when in the presence of some peril, he must swiftly come to the conviction that fear is of no possible use; I must not feel afraid; I must only think of what is to be done. And he must improve to the extent of feeling, upon occasions which formerly inspired him with fear, that to be frightened, to be disheartened, are things that are out of the question as far as his own inmost self is concerned. By self-discipline in this direction, quite definite qualities are developed which are necessary for initiation into the higher mysteries. Just as man requires nervous force in his physical being in order to use his physical sense, so also he requires in his soul nature the force which is only developed in the courageous and the fearless. For in penetrating to the higher mysteries he will see things which are concealed from ordinary humanity by the illusion of the senses. If the physical senses do not allow us to perceive the higher truth, they are for this very reason our benefactors. Things are thereby hidden from us which, if realized without due preparation, would throw us into unutterable consternation, and the sight of which would be unendurable. The student must be fit to endure this sight. He loses certain supports in the outer world which he owes to the very illusion surrounding him. It is truly and literally as if the attention of someone were called to a danger which had threatened him for a long time, but of which he knew nothing. Hitherto he felt no fear, but now that he knows, he is overcome by fear, though the danger has not been rendered greater by his knowing it.

[ 34 ] The forces at work in the world are both destructive and constructive; the destiny of manifested beings is birth and death. The seer is to behold the working of these forces and the march of destiny. The veil enshrouding the spiritual eyes in ordinary life is to be removed. But man is interwoven with these forces and with this destiny. His own nature harbors destructive and constructive forces. His own soul reveals itself to the seer as undisguised as the other objects. He must not lose strength in the face of this self-knowledge; but strength will fail him unless he brings a surplus on which to draw. For this purpose he must learn to maintain inner calm and steadiness in the face of difficult circumstances; he must cultivate a strong trust in the beneficent powers of existence. He must be prepared to find that many motives which had actuated him hitherto will do so no longer. He will have to recognize that previously he thought and acted in a certain way only because he was still in the throes of ignorance. Reasons that influenced him formerly will now disappear. He often acted out of vanity; he will now see how utterly futile all vanity is for the seer. He often acted out of greed; he will now become aware how destructive all greed is. He will have to develop quite new motives for his thoughts and actions, and it is just for this purpose that courage and fearlessness are required.

[ 35 ] It is pre-eminently a question of cultivating this courage and this fearlessness in the inmost depths of thought-life. The student must learn never to despair over failure. He must be equal to the thought: I shall forget that I have failed in this matter, and I shall try once more as though this had not happened. Thus he will struggle through to the firm conviction that the fountain-head of strength from which he may draw is inexhaustible. He struggles ever onward to the spirit which will uplift him and support him, however weak and impotent his earthly self may have proved. He must be capable of pressing on to the future undismayed by any experiences of the past. If the student has acquired these faculties up to a certain point, he is then ripe to hear the real names of things, which are the key to higher knowledge. For initiation consists in this very act of learning to call the things of the world by those names which they bear in the spirit of their divine authors. In these, their names, lies the mystery of things. It is for this reason that the initiates speak a different language from the uninitiated, for the former know the names by which the beings themselves are called into existence.

In as far as initiation itself can be discussed, this will be done in the following chapter.

A number of things make it seem precarious to speak about fairy tales in the light of spiritual investigation. One of them is the difficulty of the subject itself, since the sources of a genuine and true fairy tale mood have in fact to be sought at deep levels of the human soul. The methods of spiritual research often described by me must follow convoluted paths before these sources can be discovered. Genuine fairy tales originate from sources lying at greater depths of the human soul than is generally supposed, speaking to us magically out of every epoch of humanity's development.

A second difficulty is that, in regard to what is magical in fairy tales, one has to a considerable extent the feeling that the original, elementary impression, indeed the essential nature of the fairy tale itself is destroyed through intellectual observations and a conceptual penetration of the fairy tale. If one has the justified conviction in regard to explanations and commentaries that they destroy the immediate living impression the fairy tale ought to make in simply letting it work on one, then one would far rather not accept explanations in place of their subtle and enchanting qualities. These well up from seemingly unfathomable sources of the folk-spirit or of the individual human soul-disposition. It is really as though one were to destroy the blossom of a plant, if one intrudes with one's power of judgment in what wells up so pristinely from the human soul as do these fairy tale compositions.

Even so, with the methods of spiritual science it proves possible nonetheless to illumine at least to some extent those regions of the soul-life from which fairy tale moods arise. Actual experience would seem to gainsay the second reservation as well. Just because the origin of fairy tales has to be sought at such profound depths of the human soul, one arrives as a matter of course at the conviction that what may be offered as a kind of spiritual scientific explanation remains something that touches the source so slightly after all as not to harm it by such investigation. Far from being impoverished, one has the feeling that everything of profound significance in those regions of the human soul remains so new, unique and original that one would like best of all to bring it to expression oneself in the form of a fairy tale of some kind. One senses how impossible any other approach is in speaking out of these hidden sources.

It may be regarded as entirely natural that someone like Goethe who attempted, alongside his artistic activity, to penetrate deeply into the background, into the sources of existence, in having something to communicate of the soul's profoundest experiences, did not resort to theoretical discussion. Instead, having gained insight into the underlying sources, he makes use of the fairy tale once again for the soul's most noteworthy experiences. This is what Goethe did in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, wanting, in his fashion, to bring to expression those profound experiences of the human soul that Schiller set forth in a more philosophical-abstract form in his Letters Concerning the Aesthetic Education of the Human Race. It lies in the nature of what is magical in fairy tales that explanations cannot ultimately destroy their productive mood. For, whoever is able to arrive at the aforementioned sources from the standpoint of spiritual investigation, discovers a peculiar fact. (If I were to say all that I should like to say about the nature of fairy tales, I would have to hold many lectures. Hence, it will only be possible today to put forward a few indications and results of investigation.)

That is to say, whoever seeks to come to the aforementioned sources from the standpoint of spiritual research finds that these fairy tale sources lie far deeper down in the human soul than do the sources of creativity and artistic appreciation otherwise. This applies even with regard to the most compelling works of art—the most moving tragedies for instance. Tragedy depicts what the human soul can experience in connection with powers the poet tells us derive from the tremendous destiny uplifting it, while overwhelming the individual. The shock-waves of tragedy derive from this destiny, but such that we can say: The entanglements, the threads spun in the course of the tragedy and unraveled again are inherent in definite experiences of the human soul in the external world. These are in many respects hard to foresee, since for the most part we penetrate only with difficulty into the particular make up of the individual. Still, they can be surmised and fathomed in sensing what takes place in the human soul in consequence of its relation to life. In experiencing something tragic, one has the feeling, in one way or another, a particular soul is entangled in a particular destiny, as this is presented to us.

The sources of fairy tales and of the moods out of which they arise lie deeper than these entanglements of tragedy. The tragic, as well as other forms of artistic expression, results for us, we may feel, in seeing the human being—for instance at a particular age, a particular period of life—at the mercy of certain blows of destiny. In being affected by a tragedy, we necessarily assume that the human being is led to the corresponding involvements of destiny as a result of particular inner experiences. We sense the need to understand the specific human beings presented to us in the tragedy with their particular sets of experiences. A certain circumscribed range of what is human comes to meet us in the tragedy, as in other works of art.

In approaching fairy tales with sympathetic understanding, we have a different feeling than the one just described, since the effect of the fairy tale on the human soul is an original and elemental one, belonging to effects that are hence unconscious. In sensing what comes to meet us in fairy tales we find something altogether different from what a human being in a particular life situation may become involved in. It is not a matter of a narrowly circumscribed range of human experience, but of something lying so deep, and so integral to the soul, as to be “generally human.” We cannot say, a particular human soul at a particular age of life, in a certain situation, encounters something of the kind. Rather, what comes to expression in the fairy tale is so deeply rooted in the soul that we identify with it no matter whether as a child in the first years of life, whether in our middle years, or whether in having grown old.

What comes to expression in the fairy tale accompanies us throughout our lives in the deepest recesses of the soul. Only, the fairy tale is often a quite freewheeling and playful, pictorial expression of underlying experiences. The aesthetic, artistic enjoyment of the fairy tale may be as far removed for the soul from the corresponding inner experience—the comparison can be ventured—as say, the experience of taste on the tongue when we partake of food is removed from the complicated, hidden processes this food undergoes in the total organism in contributing to building up the organism. What the food undergoes initially evades human observation and knowledge. All the human being has is the enjoyment in tasting. The two things have seemingly little to do with each other in the first instance, and from how a particular food tastes, no one is capable of determining what purpose this food has in the whole life-process of the human organism. What we experience in the aesthetic enjoyment of the fairy tale is likewise far removed from what takes place deep down in the unconscious, where what the fairy tale radiates and pours forth out of itself joins forces with the human soul. The soul has a deep-rooted need to let the substance of the fairy tale run through its spiritual “veins,” just as the organism has a need to allow the nutrients to circulate through it.

Applying the methods of spiritual research that have been described for penetrating the spiritual worlds, at a certain stage one acquires knowledge of spiritual processes that continually take place quite unconsciously in the depths of the human soul. In normal everyday life, such spiritual processes unfolding in the soul's depths surface only occasionally in faint dream experiences caught by day-consciousness. Awakening from sleep under especially favorable circumstances, one may have the feeling: You are emerging out of a spiritual world in which thinking, in which a kind of pondering has taken place, in which something has happened in the deep, unfathomable background of existence. Though apparently similar to daytime experiences, and intimately connected with one's whole being, this remains profoundly concealed for conscious daily life.

For the spiritual researcher who has made some progress and is capable of initial experiences in the world of spiritual beings and spiritual facts, things often proceed in much the same way. As far as one advances, one still arrives again and again, so to speak, only at the boundary of a world in which spiritual processes approach one out of the deep unconscious. These processes, it must be said, are connected with one's own being. They can be apprehended almost the same way as a fata morgana appearing to one's spiritual gaze, not revealing themselves in their totality.

That is one of the strangest experiences—this peering into the unfathomable spiritual connections within which the human soul stands. In attentively following up these intimate soul occurrences, it turns out that conflicts experienced in the depths of the soul and portrayed in works of art, in tragedies, are relatively easy to survey, as compared to the generally-human soul conflicts of which we have no presentiment in daily life. Every person does nonetheless undergo these conflicts at every age of life.

Such a soul conflict discovered by means of spiritual investigation takes place for example, without ordinary consciousness knowing anything of it, every day on awakening, when the soul emerges from the world in which it unconsciously resides during sleep and immerses itself once again in the physical body. As already mentioned, ordinary consciousness has no notion of this, and yet a battle takes place every day in the soul's foundations, glimpsed only in spiritual investigation. This can be designated the battle of the solitary soul seeking its spiritual path, with the stupendous forces of natural existence, such as we face in external life in being helplessly subjected to thunder and lightning—in experiencing how the elements vent themselves upon the defenseless human being.

Though arising with stupendous force, even such rare occurrences of Nature experienced by the human being are a trifling matter as compared with the inner battle taking place unconsciously upon awakening. Experiencing itself existentially, the soul has now to unite itself with the forces and substances of the physical body in which it immerses itself, so as to make use of the senses and of the limbs once again, these being ruled by natural forces. The human soul has something like a yearning to submerge itself in the purely natural, a longing that fulfils itself with every awakening. There is at the same time, as though a shrinking back, a sense of helplessness as against what stands in perpetual contrast to the human soul—the purely natural, manifesting in the external corporeality into which it awakens. Strange as it may sound that such a battle takes place daily in the soul's foundations, it is nonetheless an experience that does transpire unconsciously. The soul cannot know precisely what happens, but it experiences this battle every morning, and each and every soul stands under the impression of this battle despite knowing nothing of it—through all that the soul inherently is, the whole way it is attuned to existence.

Something else that takes place in the depths of the soul and can be apprehended by means of spiritual investigation presents itself at the moment of falling asleep. Having withdrawn itself from the senses and from the limbs, having in a sense left the external body behind in the physical sense-world, what then approaches the human soul may be called a feeling of its own “inwardness.” Only then does it go through the inner battles that arise unconsciously by virtue of its being bound to external matter in life—and having to act in accordance with this entanglement. It feels the attachment to the sense world with which it is burdened as a hindrance, holding it back morally. Other moral moods can give us no conception of what thus transpires unconsciously after falling asleep, when the human soul is alone with itself. And all sorts of further moods then take their course in the soul when free of the body, in leading a purely spiritual existence between falling asleep and waking up.

However, it should not be supposed that these events taking place in the soul's depths are not there in the waking state. Spiritual investigation reveals one very interesting fact in particular, namely that people not only dream when they think they do, but all day long. The soul is in truth always full of dreams, only the human being does not notice this, since day consciousness is stronger as compared to dream consciousness. Just as a weaker light is drowned out by a stronger one, so what continually takes place in the course of waking consciousness as an ongoing dream-experience is drowned out by day consciousness. Though not generally aware of it, we dream all the time. And out of the abundance of dream experiences, of dreams that remain unconscious, presenting themselves as boundless in relation to the experiences of day consciousness, those dreams of which the human being does actually become conscious, separate themselves off. They do so much as a single drop of water might separate itself from a vast lake. But this dreaming activity that remains unconscious is a soul-spiritual experience. Things take place there in the soul's depths. Such spiritual experiences of the soul located in unconscious regions take their course much as chemical processes, of which we are unconscious, take place in the body.

Connecting this with a further fact arising from these lectures, additional light may be shed on hidden aspects of the soul-life spoken of here. We have often stressed—this was emphasized again in the previous lecture—that in the course of humanity's development on the earth, the soul-life of human beings has changed. Looking back far enough, we find that primeval human beings had quite different experiences from those of the human soul today. We have already spoken of the fact—and will do so again in coming lectures—that the primeval human being in early periods of evolution had a certain original clairvoyance. In the manner of looking at the world normal today in the waking state, we receive sense impressions from an external stimulus. We connect them by means of our understanding, our reason, feeling and will. This is merely the consciousness belonging to the present, having developed out of older forms of human consciousness. Applying the word in the positive sense, these were clairvoyant states. In an entirely normal way, in certain intermediate states between waking and sleeping, human beings were able to experience something of spiritual worlds. Thus, even if not yet fully self-conscious, human beings were by no means as unfamiliar in their normal consciousness with experiences taking place in the depths of the soul, such as those we have spoken of today.

In ancient times human beings perceived more fully their connection with the spiritual world around them. They saw what takes place in the soul, the events occurring deep within the soul, as connected with the spiritual in the universe. They saw spiritual realities passing through the soul and felt themselves much more related to the soul-spiritual beings and facts of the universe. This was characteristic of the original clairvoyant state of humanity. Just as it is possible today to come to a feeling such as the following only under quite exceptional conditions, in ancient times it occurred frequently—not only in artistic, but also in quite primitive human beings.

An experience of a quite vague and indefinite nature may lie buried in the depths of the soul, not rising into consciousness—an experience such as we have described. Nothing of this experience enters the conscious life of day. Something is nonetheless there in the soul, just as hunger is present in the bodily organism. And just as one needs something to satisfy hunger, so one needs something to satisfy this indefinite mood deriving from the experience lying deep within the soul. One then feels the urge to reach either for an existing fairy tale, for a saga, or if one is of an artistic disposition, perhaps to elaborate something of the kind oneself. Here it is as though all theoretical words one might make use of amount to stammering; and that is how fairy tales arise. Filling the soul with fairy tale pictures in this way constitutes nourishment for the soul as regards the “hunger” referred to.

In past ages of humanity's development every human being still stood closer to a clairvoyant perception of these inner spiritual experiences of the soul, and with their simpler constitution people were able—in sensing the hunger described here far more directly than is the case today—to seek nourishment from the pictures we possess today in the fairy tale traditions of various peoples. The human soul felt a kinship with spiritual existence. Without understanding them, it sensed more or less consciously the inner battles it had to undergo, giving pictorial form to them in pictures bearing only a distant similarity to what had taken place in the soul's substrata. Yet there is a palpable connection between what expresses itself in fairy tales and these unfathomable experiences of the human soul.

Ordinary experience shows us that a childlike soul disposition frequently creates something for itself inwardly, such as a simple “companion”—a companion really only there for this childlike mind, accompanying it nonetheless and taking part in the various occurrences of life. Who does not know, for instance, of children who take certain invisible friends along with them through life? You have to imagine that these “friends” are there when something happens that pleases the child, participating as invisible spirit companions, soul companions, when the child experiences this or that. Quite often one can witness how badly it affects the child's soul disposition when a “sensible” person comes, hears the child has such a soul companion, and now wants to talk it out of this soul companion, even perhaps considering it salutary for the child to be talked out of it. The child grieves for its soul companion. And if the child is receptive for soul-spiritual moods, this grieving signifies still more. It can mean the child begins to ail, becoming constitutionally infirm. This is an altogether real experience connected with profound inner occurrences of the human soul.

Without dispersing the “aroma” of the fairy tale, we can sense this simple experience in the fairy tale which tells of the child and the toad, related by the Brothers Grimm.¹ They tell us of the girl who always has a toad accompany her while eating. The toad, however, only likes the milk. The child talks to the animal as though with a human being. One day she wants the toad to eat some of her bread as well. The mother overhears this; she comes and strikes the animal dead. The child ails, sickens, and dies.

In fairy tales we feel soul moods reverberate that do absolutely in fact take place in the depths of the soul, such that the human soul is actually not only cognizant of them in certain periods of life, but simply by virtue of being human, irrespective of being a child or an adult. Thus, every human soul can sense something re-echo of what it experiences without comprehending it—not even raising it into consciousness—connected with what in the fairy tale works on the soul as food works on the taste buds. For the soul, the fairy tale then becomes something similar to the nutritional substance as applied to the organism. It is fascinating to seek out in deep soul experiences what re-echoes in various fairy tales. It would of course be quite a major undertaking actually to examine individual fairy tales in this regard, collected as they are in such numbers. This would require a lot of time. But what can perhaps be illustrated with a few fairy tales can be applied to all of them, in so far as they are genuine.

Let us take another fairy tale also collected by the Brothers Grimm, the fairy tale of “Rumpelstiltskin.” A miller asserts to the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold and is requested to have her come to the castle, so the king can ascertain her art for himself. The daughter goes to the castle. She is locked in a room and given a bundle of straw with which to demonstrate her art. In the room she is quite helpless. And while she is in this helpless state, a manikin appears before her. He says to her: “What will you give me, if I spin the straw into gold for you?” The miller's daughter gives him her necklace and the little man thereupon spins the straw into gold for her. The king is quite amazed, but he wants still more, and she is to spin straw into gold once again. The miller's daughter is again locked in a room, and as she sits in front of all the straw, the little man appears and says, “What will you give me, if I spin the straw to gold for you?” She gives him a little ring, and the straw is once more spun into gold by the little man. But the king wants still more. And when she now sits for the third time in the room and the little man again appears, she has nothing further to give him. At that the little man says, if she becomes queen one day, she is to grant him the first child she gives birth to. She promises to do so. And when the child is there, and the little man comes and reminds her of her promise, the miller's daughter wants a postponement. The little man then says to her: “If you can tell me what my name is, you can be free of your promise.” The miller's daughter sends everywhere, inquiring after every name. In learning every name, she wants to find out what the little man's name is. Finally, after a number of vain attempts, she actually succeeds in discovering his name—Rumpelstiltskin.

With really no work of art other than fairy tales does one have such a sense of joy over the immediate picture presented, while yet knowing of the profound inner soul-experience out of which the fairy tale is born. Though the comparison may be trivial, it is perhaps still apt: Just as a person can be aware of the chemistry of food and still find a bite to eat flavorful, so it is possible to know something of the profound inner experiences of soul that are only experienced, not “known,” and that come to expression in fairy tale pictures in the manner indicated. In fact, unknowingly the solitary human soul—it is after all alone with itself during sleep, as also in the rest of life even when united with the body—feels and experiences, albeit unconsciously, the whole disparate relation in which it finds itself in regard to its own immense tasks, its place within the divine order of the world.

The human soul does indeed feel how little it is capable of in comparing its ability with what external Nature can do, in transforming one thing into another. Nature is really a great magician, such as the human soul itself would like to be. In conscious life it may light-heartedly look past this gulf between the human soul and the wise omniscience and omnipotence of the spirit of Nature. But at deeper levels of soul experience, the matter is not done away with so easily. There, the human soul would necessarily go to rack and ruin if it were not after all to feel within it a more profound being inside the initially perceptible one, a being it can rely on, of which it can say to itself: As imperfect as you now still are—this being within you is cleverer. It is at work within you; it can carry you to the point of attaining the greatest skill. It can grant you wings, enabling you to see an endless perspective spread out before you, leading into a limitless future. You will be capable of accomplishing what you cannot as yet accomplish, for within you there is something that is infinitely more than your “knowing” self. It is your loyal helper. You must only gain a relation to it. You have really only to be able to form a conception of this cleverer, wiser, more skillful being than you yourself are, residing within you.

In calling to mind this discourse of the human soul with itself, this unconscious discourse with the more adroit part of the soul, we may feel reverberating in this fairy tale of “Rumpelstiltskin” what the soul experiences in the miller's daughter who cannot spin straw into gold, but finds in the little man a skillful, loyal helper. There, deep in the substrata of the soul—in pictures, the distinctive aura of which is not destroyed through knowing their origin—the profound inner life of soul is given.

Or, let us take another fairy tale.—Please do not take it amiss, however, if I connect this with matters having an apparently personal tinge, though not at all meant in a personal sense. The essential point will become clear in adding a few observations.

In my Esoteric Science you will find a description of world evolution. It is not my intention to talk specifically about this now—that can be left for another occasion. In this world evolution our earth is spoken of as having gone through certain stages as a planet in the cosmos, comparable to human lives that follow one upon the other. Just as the individual human being goes through lives that follow each other sequentially, so our earth has gone through various planetary life-stages, various incarnations. In spiritual science, we speak, for certain reasons, of the earth as having gone through a kind of “Moon” existence before beginning its “Earth” existence, and prior to this a kind of “Sun” existence. Thus, we may speak of a Sun-existence, a planetary predecessor existence of our Earth-existence, as having been present in a primeval past—an ancient Sun, with which the earth was still united. Then, in the course of evolution a splitting off of Sun and earth took place. From what had originally been “Sun,” the moon separated itself off as well, and our sun of today, which is not the original Sun, but only a piece of it, so to speak. Thus, we may speak, as it were, of the original Sun and of its successor, the sun of today. And we may also refer to the moon of today as a product of the old Sun. If spiritual scientific investigation follows the evolution of the earth retrospectively to where the second sun, the sun of today, developed as an independent cosmic body, it has to be said that at that time, of the creatures that might have been externally perceptible to the senses, among the animals, only those existed that had developed to the stage of the fishes.

These things can all be looked up more precisely in Esoteric Science. They can be discovered only by means of spiritual scientific investigation. At the time they had been discovered and written down by me in EsotericScience, the fairy tale in question was quite unknown to me. That is the personal factor I should like to add here. I am able to establish with certainty that it was quite unknown to me, since I only later came across it in Wilhelm Wundt's Ethnic Psychology,² whose sources I only then followed up further.

Before briefly outlining the fairy tale, I should like to say one thing in advance: Everything the spiritual researcher is able to investigate in this way in the spiritual world—and the things just referred to do have to be investigated in the spiritual world, since they are otherwise no longer extant—everything investigated in this way presents a world with which the human soul is united even so. We are connected with this world in the deepest recesses of our souls. It is always present, indeed we unconsciously enter this spiritual world in normal life upon falling asleep. Our soul is united with it and has within it not only the soul's experiences during sleep, but also those relating to the whole of evolution referred to here. Were it not paradoxical, one would like to say: in the unconscious state, the soul knows of this and experiences itself in the ongoing stream issuing from the original Sun and subsequently from the daughter sun we now see shining in the sky, as well as from the moon, also a descendant of the original Sun. And in addition, the soul experiences the fact that it has undergone an existence, soul-spiritually, in which it was not yet connected with earthly matter, in which it could look down on earthly processes; for instance, on the time in which the fish species were the highest animal organisms, where the present sun, the present moon, arose and split off from the Earth. In unconscious regions, the soul is linked to these events.

We shall now briefly follow the outline of a fairy tale found among primitive peoples, who tell us: There was once a man. As a human being, he was, however, actually of the nature of tree resin and could only perform his work during the night, since, had he carried out his work by day, he would have been melted by the Sun. One day, however, it happened that he did go out by day, in order to catch fish. And behold, the man who actually consisted of tree resin, melted away. His sons decided to avenge him. And they shot arrows. They shot arrows that formed certain figures, towering one over the other, so that a ladder arose reaching up to heaven. They climbed up this ladder, one of them during the day, the other during the night. One of them became the sun, and the other became the moon.

It is not my habit to interpret such things in an abstract way and to introduce intellectual concepts. But it is a different matter to have a feeling for the results of investigation—that the human soul in its depths is united with what happens in the world, to be grasped only spiritually, that the human soul is connected with all this and has a hunger to savor its deepest unconscious experiences in pictures. In citing the fairy tale just outlined, one feels a reverberation of what the human soul experienced as the original Sun, and as the arising of sun and moon during the fish epoch of the Earth. It was in some respects a quite momentous experience for me—this is once more the personal note—when I came across this fairy tale, long after the facts I have mentioned stood printed in my Esoteric Science. Though the notion of interpreting the whole matter abstractly still does not occur to me, a certain kindred feeling arises when I consider world evolution in the context of another, parallel portrayal—when I give myself up to the wonderful pictures of this fairy tale.

Or, as a further example, let us take a peculiar Melanesian fairy tale. Before speaking of this fairy tale, let us remind ourselves that, as shown by spiritual investigation, the human soul is also closely linked to prevailing occurrences and facts of the universe. Even if stated rather too graphically, it is still nonetheless true in a certain respect, from a spiritual scientific point of view, if we say: When the human soul leaves the physical body in sleep, it leads an existence in direct connection with the entire cosmos, feeling itself related to the entire cosmos. We may remind ourselves of the relationship of the human soul, or for example, of the human “I” with the cosmos—at least with something of significance in the cosmos. We direct our gaze to the plant world and tell ourselves: The plant grows, but it can only do so under the influence of the sun's light and warmth. We have before us the plant rooted in the earth. In spiritual science we say: the plant consists of its physical body and of the life-body which permeates it. But that does not suffice for the plant to grow and unfold itself. For that, the forces are required that work on the plant from the sun.

If we now contemplate the human body while the human being sleeps, this sleeping human body is in a sense equivalent to a plant. As a sleeping body it is comparable to the plant in having the same potential to grow as the plant. However, the human being is emancipated from the cosmic order which envelops the plant. The plant has to wait for the sun to exert its influence on it, for the rising and setting of the sun. It is bound to the external cosmic order. The human being is not so bound. Why not? Because what spiritual science points out is in fact true: the human being exerts an influence from the “I”—outside the physical body in sleep—upon the plant-like physical body, equivalent to what the sun exerts on the plant. Just as the sun pours its light out over the plants, so does the human “I” pour its light over the now plant-like physical body when the human being sleeps. As the sun “reigns” over the plants, so the human “I” reigns, spiritually, over the plant-like sleeping physical body. The “I” of the human being is thus related to the sun-existence. Indeed, the “I” of the human being is itself a kind of “sun” for the sleeping human body, and brings about its enlivening during sleep, brings it about that those forces are replenished that have been used up in the waking state. If we have a feeling for this, then we recognize how the human “I” is related to the sun. Spiritual science shows us in addition that, just as the sun traverses the arc of heaven—I am of course speaking of the apparent movement of the sun—and in a certain respect the effect of its rays differs according to whether it stands in this or that constellation of the zodiac, so the human “I” also goes through various phases in its experience. Thus, from one phase it works in one way, from a different phase it works in another way on the physical body. In spiritual science one acquires a feeling for how the sun works differently onto the earth according to whether it does so, for example, from the constellation of Aries, or from the constellation of Taurus, and so on. For that reason, one does not speak of the sun in general, but of its effect in connection with the twelve signs of the zodiac—indicating the correspondence of the changing “I” with the changing activity of the sun.

Let us now take everything that could only be sketched here, but which is developed further in Esoteric Science, as something to be gained as soul-spiritual knowledge. Let us regard it as what takes place in the depths of the soul and remains unconscious but takes place in such a way that it signifies an inner participation in the spiritual forces of the cosmos that manifest themselves in the fixed stars and planets. And let us compare all this, proclaimed by spiritual science as the secrets of the universe, with a Melanesian fairy tale, that I shall again outline only briefly:

On a country road lies a stone. This stone is the mother of Quatl. And Quatl has eleven brothers. After the eleven brothers and Quatl have been created, Quatl begins to create the present world. In this world he created, a difference between day and night was still unknown. Quatl then learns that there is an island somewhere, on which there is a difference between day and night. He travels to this island and brings a few inhabitants from this island back to his country. And, by virtue of their influence on those in his country, they too come to experience the alternating states of sleeping and waking, and the rising and setting of the sun takes place for them as a soul experience.

It is remarkable what reverberates once again in this fairy tale. Considering the fairy tale as a whole there re-echoes, with every sentence, so to speak, something of world secrets, something of what, in the sense of spiritual science, the soul experiences in its depths. One then has to say: The sources of fairy tale moods, of fairy tales generally, lie in hidden depths of the human soul. These fairy tales are presented in the form of pictures, since external happenings have to be made use of in order to provide what is to be spiritual nourishment for the hunger that wells up as an outcome of the soul's experiences. Though we are far removed from the actual experiences in question, we can sense how they reverberate in the fairy tale pictures.

With this in mind, we need not wonder that the finest, most characteristic fairy tales are those handed down from former ages when people still had a certain clairvoyant consciousness and found easier access to the sources of these fairy tale moods. Further, it need not surprise us that in regions of the world where human beings stand closer to spirituality than do the souls of the Occident, for example in India, in the Orient in general, fairy tales can have a much more distinctive character.

Neither need we be surprised that in the German fairy tales that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected in the form told them by relatives and others, often simple people, we come upon accounts reminiscent of the periods of European life in which the great heroic sagas arose. Fairy tales contain attributes found in the great heroic sagas. It need not surprise us to hear that it belatedly came to light that the most significant fairy tales are even older than the heroic sagas. Heroic sagas after all show human beings only at a particular age of life and in particular situations, while what lives in fairy tales is of a generally-human nature, accompanying human beings at every age, from their first to their last breath. It need not surprise us if the fairy tale also insistently depicts, for example, what we have referred to as a profound experience of the soul, the feeling of the soul's inadequacy on awakening in regard to the forces of Nature it helplessly faces and is only a match for, if it has the consolation of knowing at the same time: Within you, there is something that transcends your personal self, and makes you in a certain respect the victor once again over the forces of Nature.

In sensing this mood, one has a feeling for why human beings so often find themselves up against giants in fairy tales. Why do these giants appear? Well, as an image, these giants arise as a matter of course from the whole tone of the soul in wanting to make its way into the body again in the morning, seeing itself confronted by the “giant” forces of Nature occupying the body. What the soul senses there as a battle, what it then feels is altogether real—not in rational terms, but as corresponds to depictions of the manifold battles of the human being with giants. When all this comes to meet it, it clearly senses how it possesses only one thing, its shrewdness, in this whole battle—in its stand in confronting giants. For, this entails the feeling: You could now reenter your body, but what are you, as against the immense forces of the universe! However, you do have something not there in these giants, and that is cunning—reason! This does in fact stand unconsciously before the soul, even if it has also to say to itself, that it can do nothing against the immense forces of the universe. We see how the soul transposes this literally into a picture in giving expression to the mood in question:

A man goes along a country road and comes to an inn. In the inn he asks for milk-soup (blancmange). Flies enter the soup. He finishes eating the milk-soup, leaving the flies. Then he strikes the plate, counts the flies he has killed, and brags: “A hundred at one blow!” The innkeeper hangs a sign around his neck: “He has killed a hundred at one blow.” Continuing along the country road, this man comes to a different region. There a king looks out the window of his castle. He sees the man with the sign around his neck and says to himself: I could well use him. He takes him into his service and assigns him a definite task. He says to him: “You see, the problem is, whole packs of bears always come into my kingdom. If you have struck a hundred dead, then you can certainly also strike the bears dead for me.” The man says: “I am willing to do it!” But, until the bears are there, he wants a good wage and proper meals, for, having thought about it, he says to himself: If I can't do it, I shall at least have lived well until then.—When the time came, and the bears were approaching, he collected all kinds of food and various good things bears like to eat. Then he approached them and laid these things out. When the bears got there, they ate until they were full to excess, finally lying there as though paralyzed; and now he struck them dead one after the other. The king arrived and saw what he had accomplished. However, the man told him: “I simply had the bears jump over a stick and chopped off their heads at the same time!” Delighted, the king assigns him another task. He says to him: “Now the giants will soon also be coming into my land, and you must help me against them as well.” The man promised to do so. And when the time approached, he again took a quantity of provisions with him, including a lark and a piece of cheese. On actually encountering the giants, he first entered into a conversation with them about his strength. One of the giants said: “We shall certainly show you that we are stronger,” taking a stone and crushing it in his hand. Then he said to the man: “That is how strong we are! What can you do as compared to us?” Another giant took an arrow, shooting it so high that only after a long time did the arrow come down again and said: “That's how strong we are! What can you do as compared to us?” At this, the man who had killed a hundred at one blow said: “I can do all that and more!” He took a small piece of cheese and a stone, spreading the stone with cheese, and said to the giants: “I can squeeze water out of a stone!” And he squashed the cheese so that water squirted out of it. The giants were astonished at his strength in being able to squeeze water from a stone. Then the man took the lark and let it fly off, saying to the giants: “Your arrow came back down again, the one I have shot, however, goes up so high that it does not come back down at all!” For the lark did not return at all. At that, the giants were so amazed, they agreed among themselves that they would only be able to overcome him with cunning. They no longer thought of being able to overcome him with the strength of giants. Nonetheless, they did not succeed in outwitting him; on the contrary, he outwitted them. While they all slept, he put an inflated pig's bladder over his head, inside which there was some blood. The giants had said to themselves: Awake, we shall not be able to get the better of him, so we shall do it while he sleeps. They struck him while he slept, smashing the pig's bladder. Seeing the blood that spurted out, they thought they had finished him off. And they soon fell asleep. In the peaceful quiet that overcame them, they slept so soundly that he was able to put an end to them.

Even though, like some dreams, the fairy tale ends here somewhat indefinitely and on an unsatisfactory note, we nonetheless have before us a portrayal of the battle of the human soul against the forces of Nature—first against the “bears,” then against the “giants.” But something else becomes evident in this fairy tale. We have the man who has “killed a hundred at one blow.” We have an echo of what lives at the deepest unconscious levels of the soul: the consolation in becoming aware of its own shrewdness over against these stronger, overwhelming forces. It is not a good thing when what has been presented artistically in pictures is interpreted abstractly. That is not at all what matters. On the other hand, nothing of the artistic form of the fairy tale is diminished if one has a feeling for the fact that the fairy tale is an after-echo of events taking place deep within the soul. These events are such that we can know a great deal about them, as much as one can come to know by means of spiritual investigation—yet, in immersing ourselves in fairy tales and experiencing them, they still remain original and elementary.

In researching them, it is certainly agreeable to know that fairy tales present what the soul needs on account of its deepest experiences, as we have indicated. At the same time, no fairy tale mood is destroyed in arriving at a deeper recognition of the sources of subconscious life. Presented only abstractly, we find these sources are impoverished for our consciousness, whereas the fairy tale form is really the more comprehensive one for expressing the deepest experiences of the soul.

It is then comprehensible that Goethe expressed in the significant and evocative pictures of the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily what he was abundantly able to experience, and which Schiller chose to express in abstract-philosophical concepts. Thus, despite having thought a great deal, Goethe wanted to say in pictures what he felt concerning the deepest underlying strata of human soul-life. And because the fairy tale relates in this way to the innermost soul, it is precisely the form most suited to the child. For it may be said of fairy tales that they have brought it about that what is most profound in spiritual life is expressed in the simplest possible form. In fact, one gradually comes to feel that in all conscious artistic life there is no greater art than that which completes the path from the uncomprehended depths of soul-life to the delightful, often playful pictures of the fairy tale.

An art capable of expressing in the most self-evident form what is hard to comprehend is the greatest and most natural art, an art intimately related to the human being. And just because, in the case of the child, the essential human being is still united in an unspoilt way with the whole of existence, with the whole of life, the child especially needs the fairy tale as nourishment for its soul. What depicts spiritual powers can come alive more fully in the child. The childlike soul may not be enmeshed in abstract theoretical concepts if it is not to be obliterated. It has to remain connected with what is rooted in the depths of existence.

Hence, we can do nothing of greater benefit for the soul of the child than in allowing what unites the human being with the roots of existence to act upon it. As the child still has to work creatively on its own physical formation, summoning the formative forces for its own growth, for the unfolding of its natural abilities, it senses wonderful soul nourishment in fairy tale pictures that connect it with the roots of existence. Since, even in giving themselves over to what is rational and intellectual, human beings can still never be wholly torn away from the roots of existence, they gladly turn again at every age to the fairy tale, provided they are of a sufficiently healthy and straightforward soul disposition. For there is no stage of life and no human situation that can estrange us altogether from what flows from fairy tales—in consequence of which we could cease having anything more to do with what is most profound in human nature or have no sense for what is so incomprehensible for the intellect, expressed in the self-evident, simple, primitive fairy tale and fairy tale mood.

Hence, those who have concerned themselves for a long time with restoring to humanity the fairy tales that had been rather glossed over by civilization, individuals such as the Brothers Grimm, understandably had the feeling—even if they did not adopt a spiritual scientific view—that they were renewing something that belongs intimately to human nature. After an intellectual culture had done its part over a period of centuries to estrange the human soul, including the soul of the child, such collections of fairy tales as those of the Brothers Grimm have quite properly found their way again to all human beings receptive for such things. In this way they have become once more the common heritage of children's souls, indeed of all human souls. They will do so increasingly, the more spiritual science is not just taken as theory, but becomes an underlying mood of the soul, uniting it more and more in feeling with the spiritual roots of its existence.³

In this way, by means of the dissemination of spiritual science, what genuine fairy tale collectors, those truly receptive for fairy tales as well as those who present them have declared, will prove well-founded. This is what a certain individual, a true friend of fairy tales, often said in lectures I was able to hear.⁴ It is a wonderfully poetic utterance which at the same time summarizes what results from such spiritual scientific considerations as we have presented today. It may be formulated in words this man spoke—knowing as he did how to love fairy tales, collecting them, and appreciating them. He always liked to add the saying:

“Fairy tales and sagas are comparable to a good angel, granted human beings as a companion from birth on their life's wanderings, to be a trustworthy comrade throughout—offering comradeship, and making life inwardly into a truly ensouled fairy tale!”⁵

• 1. in “Tales About Toads”
• 2. published in 10 volumes, 1900-1920
• 3. In 1856 Wilhelm Grimm wrote: “Common to all fairy tales is a residual faith reaching back into ancient times, expressing itself in a pictorial grasp of supersensible things.”
• 4. This is in all probability a reference to Rudolf Steiner's friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer (1825-1900), professor of literature at the Technische Hochschule (Institute of Technology) in Vienna, discoverer of the Oberufer Christmas Plays, and described by Rudolf Steiner as “a researcher in the style of the Brothers Grimm.” (Document of Barr, Sept. 1907.)
• 5. Schröer was in turn quoting Wilhelm Grimm

During each winter in the past years, I was allowed to give a lecture here on a spiritual-scientific topic. The local friends have also requested such a lecture for this year. And it will seem understandable that in these difficult, fateful and destiny-bearing times, such a reflection may lead to that which fills us all deeply, deeply in our hearts and souls. Our thoughts and feelings are directed towards the East and the West, to where the great events of our time are unfolding in such a significant, grand, powerful, and painful way; where the fate of humanity is not discussed with words, but with deeds, which find expression in courage, confidence, bravery, in death and suffering, but also in all the uplifting sacrifices that are so abundant in the time when something so significant is also happening for our Central European humanity.

What can be stimulated in our present time regarding the relationship between the European national souls may be the subject of today's spiritual scientific reflection. It may be the subject of this reflection in the way that spiritual science can illuminate these very conditions. This spiritual science, which has indeed found little, truly little, favor and acceptance among the majority of contemporary people, but which, for those who are imbued with its innermost meaning, its innermost spirit, presents itself that it must take its stand for the whole movement for the whole life of the human spirit in the cultural movement for the present and the near future, just as the scientific movement for several centuries has taken its stand in cultural life. And it is precisely in the face of the deeply moving questions of life that spiritual science must prove itself.

Among the concepts that have provoked the most ridicule and opposition in my first fundamental spiritual science book - in my “Theosophy” - is the concept of the folk soul not as an abstraction, as a mere idea and sum of characteristics that hold a group of people together, but as a real, active being. We have already reached a point where the habits of thought that have been formed over centuries no longer want to go along with spiritual science.

Just as human beings, as the highest of earthly beings, stand in relation to the entities of the other natural kingdoms, just as the entities of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms find their physical, sensory culmination in the human being, so spiritual science must show - however unusual it may be for present-day ideas - that the realms of beings are not limited to the visible, that there are other realms above the human being, which cannot be reached with the mind that is bound to our brain, or with our physical, sensory eyes and ears, but which can be reached with what Goethe called spiritual vision, spiritual eyes and ears. This is not said comparatively, but to express something that is as certain for anthroposophy as, for example, the biological results are for the external science.

Spiritual science says that the way a person, with their soul, faces the things and entities of external nature, and how they form concepts and ideas about them, so there are truly real spiritual beings, invisible to the physical eye, above the human being, and for these beings, the human being with their soul is as much a thought, as it is an idea, as the objects of external nature are for the human being. Thus we are permeated and held by these spiritual beings. And to one of the next classes of these beings, spiritual science must count what for many is only the coincidence of the characteristics of a people: the folk souls.

What matters is the relationship of the folk soul to the individual human soul. Spiritual science does not look at the soul like popular psychology. It regards it not as a product of the outer organization, but as the real creator of the outer organization. And not to make an easy classification, but out of the nature of things, the spiritual scientific researcher distinguishes three essential parts of the soul with the same justification - only of course transferred to another area - as one distinguishes in the rainbow spectrum the red color on one side, the green in the middle, and then the blue color. And just as one cannot grasp the interaction of light and colors without taking this structure, which is most clearly seen in the rainbow spectrum, so one cannot understand the human soul without the threefold nature that we describe as the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. Just as the rainbow has the color red on one side, so the human being has the sentient soul on one side; in the middle, the human being has the mind or emotional soul; and just as the rainbow has the color blue, so the human being has the consciousness soul. As I said, this does not arise from arbitrariness, from a desire to classify, but is connected with the innermost nature of the soul.

Let us first take the sentient soul: just as the red part of the spectrum primarily contains warmth, so the sentient soul contains more of the desires, the passions, the passionate forces of the soul, but at the same time, when the soul goes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, [withdraws into] that which are the eternal forces of the soul, which mysteriously hide behind the drives, the passions, the desires, which at the same time are what imprints the soul with the eternal character. But what exists in the soul as the mediation of the eternal self of the human being with the temporal-spatial human being corresponds to the green color, which primarily serves the light, just as the mind serves the spiritual, mediating the human being's relationship to his eternal and temporal.

And the consciousness soul is what consumes the eternal between birth and death to work on the temporal; it is most turned towards the material world. The consciousness soul is what contains the soul powers that are least carried through the gate of death, that are least connected to the eternal self of man.

In all that we distinguish as nuances of the soul life, the actual I of the human being lives as light lives in the nuances of the spectrum. As there is light in every color, so there is I in every part of the human soul; but at the same time, what permeates the human being like an invisible entity passes through the I into the soul's members: the soul of the people to which he belongs. The relationship between the national soul and the individual human soul varies greatly, and nations differ according to the nature of the relationship between the national soul and the individual human soul. There is not enough time in the world if I were to attempt to develop in full, on the basis of spiritual scientific research, the nature of the relationship between the national soul and the human soul. A comparison can be enlightening here, but it should be more than just a comparison; it should give a genuine spiritual-scientific result.

If we look at a person in relation to the mineral, plant and animal world, we can distinguish three types of people. Firstly, there are people whose whole being is inclined only towards the external sense world, who cannot sharply concentrate their attention on something that withdraws from the sense world, who always need the impression of the outside world. They fall into indifference and inattention when they are supposed to have ideas that do not adhere to the outside world.

There is another relationship to the environment that we encounter more in inward-looking, sensible natures, who go through the world in such a way that their senses are little attracted by external nature, who produce inwardly, who bring forth from the life of the soul what they experience. They go through the world of the senses raving and dreaming. These are very different types of people because the soul relates to itself and to the outer world in different ways.

A third type is the one who has placed himself in history primarily through the representative of Germanness, through Goethe. A great thinker of his time called his thinking “representational thinking”. By this he meant that Goethe had the peculiarity of being just as oriented towards sensual things as he was, and that he could immerse himself in the spiritual that he was able to experience in and with things. The ideas of “spirit and body” were intimately interwoven in his soul. His thinking was objective and did not stray far from the objects, and when it did go to the objects, it did not stray from itself.

Corresponding to this threefold relationship of man to the world around him, we also have three types of relationship of the folk soul to the individual human soul. For just as the human being relates to nature, so the folk soul relates to the individual human soul. There are folk souls that relate to individual souls in such a way that they are completely devoted to the individual human beings, as it were, that they completely slip into them and permeate them, that the individual soul is something that is the imprint of the folk soul.

This is the preferred relationship for the souls that inhabit the west and south of Europe: the French, Italian and British people. The relationship is different for the Russian people. There we find that the folk soul remains, as it were, above the individual souls, that it does not enter into the being of the individual human being, which is expressed by the fact that the Russian people still have today - like a cloud spreading over the whole nation - the Byzantine religion, which does not connect with the individual soul. Such is the relationship of the folk soul to the individual Russian person.

[Where, as in Western Europe, the national soul takes hold of the individual souls, it dominates the individual souls so that the individual soul is something like an imprint of the national soul. Just as the national soul in the West is within the individual soul, so the relationship of the Russian national soul is such that it does not descend.

Like the person who lives only in his or her own soul, the national soul does not descend to the individual soul; the national soul, as it were, raves over the people. The Russian souls are not seized by the folk soul, but rather they are in anarchic confusion. Even when one thinks of the excellent representatives of the Russian people, of Tolstoy and so on, one sees how the folk soul hovers over them like a cloud and that the individual soul forces are not seized by it, but are in anarchic confusion.

Let us now turn to the center of Europe: here we find such a relationship between the soul of the people and the individual soul that we can compare this relationship with Goethe's objective thinking. We have the soul of the people lovingly and intimately entering into the individual souls and yet, at the same time, rising above itself and being transported into the spiritual worlds in order to draw new strength and carry it down from the spiritual worlds. We have here the life of the soul of the people above the human being in the spiritual heights, and then again in the individual human souls.

One can say: When you look at the people of Western Europe, a particular soul force is always taken hold of and ruled by the folk soul: in the Italians, the sentient soul; in the French, the mind or mind soul; in the British, the consciousness soul. All the qualities that the members of these nations have [precisely as members of these nations] immediately become clear and understandable when viewed from this perspective of the nature of the facts, which can be found through spiritual science. How powerfully passionate, how completely immersed in instinct, all of Italian life appears, right up to the greatness of Dante, who drafted his Divine Comedy from the images of the sentient soul. The Italian people become understandable when one knows that it is the folk soul that takes hold of the sentient soul here.

The French nation becomes understandable when one recognizes that the folk soul directly takes hold of the intellectual soul. I read how a psychological society in a German city tried to explain the French national character. The result was: That is their mathematical disposition. This disposition becomes immediately understandable when one knows that the folk soul directly takes hold of the powers of the intellectual soul. Everything in this western nation is illuminated when one knows that it tends to take things in such a way that, despite all striving for personal freedom and national freedom, it is inwardly dogmatized and systematized to the point of artistic activity, to the point of the details of artistic activity. And we also find the other side there. I would like to say the negative pole of the dogma: that is criticism, the dissolving element. On the one hand, the rational soul wants to see everything in a system of dogmas, and if it cannot, it rebels against it, and so we have either dogmatism or Voltairism. The starting point of Descartes' philosophy is doubt down to the last detail. You can understand what is happening in the French people if you know this.

I note that a number of prominent figures are sitting here who know that I have been dealing with these things for years and that they have not been formulated by the occasion of the present. But I believe that they can be enlightening for what we are now experiencing, which is so great, so meaningful and so painful.

Now to the consciousness soul. The part that is most inclined towards the outer life and carries least into the eternal part of the human being is the consciousness soul, and in the British people it is most seized by the folk soul. The character of the British people as a trading nation and also the character of Shakespeare immediately becomes clear. For what is his greatness based on? That he has portrayed the individual human being in such a sharp characteristic, that they stand firmly on the physical plane, that he characterizes them in what does not pass through the gate of death. He is so great because he has succeeded in characterizing so sharply what is human in man that is not eternal about them, but what they develop for the physical world between birth and death.

Now, the German national soul, or, as I could also say, Central European culture, is characterized by the fact that it does not take hold of the soul directly, but descends to the soul and takes hold of it in its entirety, as it were with that which flows from the sources of the spiritual world, for it has the gift of withdrawing into the spiritual worlds and drawing strength from there. Hence the peculiarity of the German soul to experience that which has the power of the eternal, which directly flows from the eternal into the individual souls. The individual soul must be able to feel that something in your soul lives through the national soul, which sinks into you, which is carried into you, and through which you are directly connected to what lives in spiritual heights. Hence the idealism, hence the ever-rejuvenating power of the German national soul.

One can go through the products of German intellectual life and obtain the evidence that, in contrast to other nations, the German has this peculiar relationship to the folk soul: not the individual soul elements are seized, as in the western and eastern nations of Europe, but the ego, of which the German seems to be less developed. One is a Briton, a Frenchman; a German is to be made.

It is an ideal because not a single power of the soul, but the whole soul is seized in the most profound life in the constant emergence of the different sides. Let us look back to the times when Christianity penetrated into the young, developing Germanic nation. How was it received? We can see this from the Old High German poem “Heliand”. What the individual - here the poet of “Heliand” - feels about the events, his personal experience, is directly related to the forces that surround him. What was only handed down to the Romans is reborn from the youngest germinal forces of the poet.

And in other poems we find how Christianity not only becomes part of the German people, but is born out of the individual human being, as it becomes a personal matter for the individual. It is the soul of the people that does not allow what comes to the people to grow old, but rejuvenates it so that it lives like a plant in the soul and rises again.

Furthermore, we see how a world view develops in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries that is called German mysticism, for example in the works of Tauler, Meister Eckhart, the unknown author of Theologia Deutsch, and so on. We see how the minds work in a peculiar way, how they relate to the spiritual world. The mystic Eckhart is convinced that the spiritual world must be experienced directly in the soul, that it must be left entirely to itself, that it must not move out of its own arbitrariness, but must give itself to the forces that are weaving and ruling through the world. Then something ignites in it, which is a spark, but in this spark lives God, the divine weaving and being.

The place where God lives within, [where Christ is born within, which suffers] and dies when the individual soul goes the way of suffering and passion, / gap in the text] is where Meister Eckhart coined the word “Gemüt”. In the mind, the world is spiritually revived, and it is aware that what a person thinks, the Godhead thinks, what a person feels, the Godhead feels, what a person wills, the Godhead wills, if only he gives himself to his God. There we have something of the intimate coexistence of the individual with the German folk soul.

And in the author of Theologia Deutsch we find a rejuvenation of the German Weltanschauung through a rhythmic beat of the life of the German national soul with the individual representatives of the German national soul. What in earlier times led to the resurrection of the life of Jesus, as if Jesus had wandered through Germany's countryside with his disciples as his servants, which so personally depicted the life of Jesus, which rejuvenated Christianity, that rejuvenates the worldview in German mysticism. And it is wonderful how deeply the German national soul intervenes in personal life! This becomes clear when we look at one of the disciples of mysticism, at Angelus Silesius, when we share a saying of this mystic, one of the deepest of the numerous sayings:

I neither die nor live. God Himself dies in me,

And what I am to live, He also lives for and for.

Oh, what depths, we say, only in relation to the thought of immortality! He who has done this feels the ruling divinity. When I die, it is just as much an act of the divinity as when I live, it is the divinity that lives in me. By letting God experience death in me, I am aware of my immortality.

One can say: such ideas of immortality, which point to an immortal power in the human soul that is not grasped by reflecting on what lies beyond death, but is already grasped by it in life, are demonstrated by Jakob Böhme, the simple cobbler from Görlitz, the profound philosopher, who was fully inspired by the German folk spirit. He directed his enlightened gaze to that which is of the divine worlds in his own soul. He saw the courage of human striving on earth in the fact that the individual human soul, which is otherwise given over to emotional impressions, to those of the intellect and so on, always knows itself connected with its immortal core, with that which lives in death, that knows how to die by living out of direct knowledge.

Jakob Böhme's goal was to experience death directly in earthly life, and that this is the seed for the experiences of life. An expression that appears to be the utterance of the German national soul through a single person is the following:

He who does not die before he dies,

He perishes when he dies.

Those who do not grasp during their lifetime what lives in the soul as an immortal and thus pass through the gate of death, those who do not grasp death as the source of spiritual life, perish when they die. We see the highest philosophical view, but one that is also imbued with elemental soul power, rising to the highest heights of the spiritual.

When we see such figures of German nationality before our minds, we perceive how the German national soul has a rejuvenating effect again and again, so that it must always take hold of spirit and soul as a fresh germ in order to go up the whole ladder, to go to the highest heights of spiritual fruit.

And after the scorching and burning devastation of the Thirty Years' War, we see the German soul's strength once again intervening in the life of the people.

This is also the case with Herder, who provided a broad overview in his “History of Mankind”, encompassing the entire nature of the soul, from the most elementary soul forces to the highest philosophical powers. There are many, many ways in which the soul of a nation lives in Goethe's soul. It is remarkable that we realize that in turn a poetic work could arise in him that could not have arisen within any other culture. If the German folk soul has the peculiarity of grasping not the individual soul forces but the whole soul, then it grasps the immortal in the mortal, and the personality becomes the bearer of the eternal. Therefore, Goethe's “Faust” could only arise within German culture. It contains everything in the human soul, all the striving for the very beginnings of spiritual life, which are consciously sought again after all tradition has been cast off. How is this presented?

Let us compare how the German soul power inspires the German people in relation to the French people. In both, the Greek is reviving. But how does it revive with the French poets? It is studied, the rules are adopted and so on. But how is it with Goethe? Even in “Iphigenia” the Greek is not adopted, but reborn anew, rejuvenated. And in “Faust” we have the union with what he regarded as Greek: Helen is reborn for Faust. He becomes young in order to unite with the representative of Greek culture. Faust, who has grown old, throws off the old and seeks the rejuvenating potion. What is historically given must be brought into connection with Faust in a rejuvenated form. This demands the full strength, the rejuvenating strength of the German national soul.

We can trace it everywhere in all the details of German intellectual life! This is what comes to consciousness through an immersion in the substance of the German national soul. One sees, feels and senses an ever-renewing power in it. However present culture may change, this renewing power will remain, because its magic breath will be breathed again and again in different epochs. This is a peculiarity of Central European culture. This hope and confidence, which immediately becomes strength, is the basis not for superficial but for profound optimism in the German, which is also connected to idealism in all philosophies. Whoever is truly capable of approaching what the German national soul has produced cannot despair of humanity, but always comes to a belief in humanity, and indeed to a spiritual belief in humanity.

This becomes very significant when one looks at spirits who turn their gaze to humanity in search of something that can give good hope for the further development of man, and who can find nothing, who believe that European culture has died out. No one can regard European culture as having grown old; they can understand the relationship between the soul of the people and the individual German soul. Anyone who considers European culture to be old does not understand that.

That is why we have a Russian intellectual who has searched for what can make humanity happy and cannot find anything that has grown out of this culture of the national soul. He looks everywhere and finds nothing. I am talking about Herzen, the great Russian who became so small in his own eyes when he wanted to understand Central European culture. The following saying of Herzen immediately sheds light on the way the Eastern European, anarchic soul views desolation where flourishing life can be seen by those who can understand Central European soul life. He enters into an intellectual alliance with an Englishman, with Stuart Mill, and says:

Mill is not exaggerating when he speaks of the narrowing of the mind, of the constant flattening of life, of the reduction of life to commercial culture. He says that England will become like China, and we add that England will not be alone.

That is what Herzen says, who has no understanding for what must fill the Central European with the highest vitality. And further he says:

Perhaps a coincidence will save us from Chinese desiccation.

If he had understood Goethe, such a statement would be impossible! Further Herzen says:

Where is the highest thought, that is, hope, which hardens the hearts so that they feel neither pain nor suffering. Look around you, what can uplift the hearts.

That the same force that brought forth the highest poetic and philosophical blossoms in Goethe is the same force that today brings forth countless victims, victims of death and suffering, that is what presents itself to us at the same time from the whole context of German life.

And has German life always been so misunderstood in the world as it is now, when it is being shouted at from all sides that it is a life of “barbarians”? Not only is Central Europe being surrounded like a large fortress with the intention of starving it out, no, it is also being scolded and reviled from all sides. Here and there, friendly voices are raised, for example, by a Romanian who exclaims:

All those who have studied in France and lived among the French people have rushed to fill the columns of newspapers with all kinds of praise. Why don't you, who have enjoyed German hospitality, respond to these people by saying that these barbarians have the best schools, clinics, universities and so on? That you were welcomed everywhere with open arms! Why don't you respond by saying that these barbarians, who were your teachers, are incapable of committing such crimes? [Why don't you respond?

These voices were not always so rare. It is uncomfortable for a Central European to characterize the German essence in value judgments. What I have said, I know, is as certain a result of spiritual scientific research as the laws of the solar spectrum are a scientific research result. But it is uncomfortable for a German to make value judgments about the German character, so let us first hear from others. First Emerson, the great American teacher. In his reflections on Goethe, he wrote as if there were some awareness of how the German national character relates to the individual soul, and of the difference between Eastern and Western Europe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of its conviction. In France, one is already delighted to see brilliant ideas going wherever they may. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts will take them. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind has neither the French liveliness nor the Englishman's understanding, honed for practicality, nor, finally, the American

— as I said, an American writing in English —

All he has is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands that a writer stand above things and simply express himself. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it advocate? What is the man's opinion? Where does it come from? Where does he get all these thoughts?

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

There is something alive in these words that can seem like an echo of what can arise from the intimate association of the soul of the people with the individual human being. And Emerson continues:

That is why the distinguishing terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality, and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something even better in mind. He makes me curious. He has that fearsome independence that comes from dealing with the truth.

You could say: Well, that was said by Emerson, who lived far away in America. We have had to listen to it: the Germans who live now are not the same as they were. Even the French philosopher Bergson said how the Germans have become mechanical. It is strange how, in this day and age, a man who wants to be a philosopher wants to come to his judgment: He certainly longs for judgment! He knows that Germans have had great thoughts. He seems to feel that when cannons and rifles are turned against Germans from all sides, they should then recite poems by Novalis or Goethe in response.

Strange logic is going around the world today. When people say, “Who wanted this war,” and the English, French, and Russians claim, “We didn't want it,” one could say, “Yes, we believe that too!” But it does not depend on what one says, but on whether one can say the relevant thing. If five people stand threateningly around a house, and the person who lives in it sees this and tells them to go away, and they then, because they do not leave, are beaten up by them, the five can also say: “We did not want the beating!”

One cannot say that Emerson's judgment of the German “barbarians” is already outdated, but one would think that those who have immersed themselves in German intellectual substance can judge better.

A few years before the war, a book was published by an Englishwoman entitled “Eight Years in Germany”. She visited German schools, clinics and so on and, having got to know the German character, wrote the following:

We read a lot about the new Germany and the new German spirit. Is what exists now the mature work of generations? Blinded by the splendor of Germany's wealth, we are inclined to forget that it has never occupied any place but the very forefront except for prosperity. In literature, it has always provided the impetus; in science, it has always shone; in music, it has always dominated.

And now the following. I don't know if she would have written it now, but about two years before the war she did:

Forty years ago Germany was fighting for her existence, and she is still fighting for it today. It is entirely wrong to believe that Germany has already reached her zenith. She is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals, whose power and experience was gained generations ago. [...]

On every border and across the water, opponents sit, commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, to pounce on it and bring it down.

The reasons why the German national character is so little understood can be grasped. Something can penetrate into the West from the German soul — less so into the East — but it is repelled in the West because it does not want to know anything about the dogmatic character of what wants to live actively in the whole soul. There is a certain understanding, but at the same time a reluctance to let it grow completely into the soul.

About a year and a half before the outbreak of the war, lectures were held in Manchester. They have been published and were very interesting, and the scholars explain in the preface why they are holding them: English journalists should be better informed about German conditions. About the immediate present, the scholar Herford said that on the whole it is out of the question that the creation of the German Reich has been beneficial to peace. [Gap in the text] History should be something more than a cinematograph and shed the higher light on things:

On the whole and in the big picture, there is no question

- it says -

that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace. This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is fitting for her to let the light of the past shine on the present confusion, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For if we look to the past, we find that our ancestors looked at France with far greater fear than the wildest rabble-rousers today fear Germany. And the fear of our ancestors had good reason. [...] So, to sum up, it can be shown that the founding of the German Empire was an asset for Europe and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 once and for all put an end to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the hitherto unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed an inducement to war which in earlier centuries had so often tempted into the wrong channels; they put the German people in a position to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved at a single blow what Great Britain, despite all her expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to accomplish, namely, to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a great war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

When one is confronted with these things and wonders what lies in the souls of those who wrote them, one must have some understanding of the peculiarity of the European national psyche to grasp why one can understand [it] so little outside of Germany. Only enlightened minds can do that.

One mystic who has written beautiful things should also be mentioned. He confessed that he had great experiences with three mystics. One of them is Novalis, who gained so much from his intimate contact with the German folk soul. He uses beautiful words to characterize him. He says: “So much is going on on earth that can only interest earthly souls, such as what Shakespearean characters do. But if other beings from other planets could look down, what could interest them?” And he wonders if there is something that can interest other spirits as well, and in Novalis' writings he finds something that interests not only earthly souls but also beings that come down from heavenly heights. What the human soul can hardly bring forth in words is what he speaks of, what one would rather remain silent about, where true nature begins. He says:

But if he needed other proof, it would

— that is, presumably, the soul —

lead him among those whose works almost move one to silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises by one level and where all those who are filled with restlessness about themselves attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone, there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a strange reason; but [the people I am talking about] have come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community.

This is how this enlightened spirit assessed Novalis. Who is it that speaks in this way? Is it someone who calls to account the self-righteous critics who are now railing against German “barbarism”? Is it someone who will take a stand against words such as:

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to discern its weak, childlike voice amidst the useless clamor that surrounds it.

The words written by the enlightened man about Novalis are by Maeterlinck. And the words about the bawler are also by him. We are now experiencing such things; they characterize our time directly through themselves, without the need to add anything in particular.

The lectures mentioned, which were held in Manchester, have been published and also translated into German. In the preface there are some words that can also be read in English:

The source of the stream of his intellectual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient Greece, the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany today is to a great extent concrete and practical.

The one saying this is Lord Haldane.

If we consider how different the European center and the European east must be in terms of the overall character of the people, it can be understood that a powerful confrontation was bound to occur there. This confrontation was seen by people who wanted to see clearly. Today we hear from all sides: The Germans wanted this war. Who wanted it, who, because of the special character of their national aspirations, had to want it for a long time, was always seen by reasonably enlightened minds. A man who is not particularly inclined towards Germanic nature writes:

As for me, I am in no doubt that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic worlds is imminent, that it will be ignited either by the Orient, especially Turkey, or by the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps by both, and that Russia will take the lead in it on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spewing fire and flames against Germany. [...] The German press is already sounding its warning cries. It has been a long time since Russia gathered itself after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now considered appropriate in St. Petersburg to take up the Oriental question again.

If, according to the more pompous than true expression, the Mediterranean Sea should once become “a French lake”, Russia has the even more positive intention of making a Russian lake out of the Black Sea and a Russian pond out of the Sea of Marmara. That Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia is a fixed goal of Russian policy, which finds its levers of support in the common religion and in Pan-Slavism.

Thus, the minds that wanted to see it, saw how the forces at work in Europe gradually brought about this time. This was written in 1870!

The antagonism between Eastern Europe and Central Europe has always been there, so that the logic of the question, “Who wanted this war?”, is the flimsiest, because the people, whose soul hovers like a cloud over it, has a desire for expansion, and because there is not the slightest understanding for what has been achieved in Central Europe. It was received in Russia, but the way it happened is again quite characteristic.

It is true, as Herman Grimm says, that the Englishman Mr. Lewes wanted to write an important book about Goethe. But he only told of a man who happened to be born in Frankfurt am Main and happened to die in Weimar, who had this and that experience and wrote these and those works. But the soul of Goethe does not live in it, because his soul slips through his fingers. He only sees what he can dogmatize; he only sees the Goethe that stands firmly on the ground – the dates of birth and death and so on. He knows the titles of the works and so on. But what Goethe really was, that he was the representative of the dialogue between the individual German and the German national soul, he does not sense.

Just as the phenomenon has the effect in the West that the inner passions rebel against it and translate it into the rough, but into the dogmatic, so that which is directly experienced by the Germans has the same effect in the East – as I said, they have often willingly accepted it – in the East it becomes a web of thought. Because the Russian feels that it must be carried up into the cloud that hovers over him, it becomes ghostly, shadowy.

Even the great philosopher Soloviev floats in this cloud. He borrowed his generous philosophy from German culture – but what lives with full life in the German soul seems ghostly to him, and it causes the confusedly fluttering thoughts that the German, who is accustomed to the intimate association with the folk soul, cannot follow as an image of truth. One must even experience it, [that an intellectual in Russia makes Goethe] into a ghost in yet another way, one who, however, once called another people “barbarians” before the war: Mereschkowski. He speaks of Herz's last vision of death:

The last vision of death in Herz is - Russia as a “land of free life” and the Russian peasant community as the savior of the world. He exchanged his old love for a new faith, but it seems that he realized in the last hour that this last faith was also an illusion. Even if faith deceived him, love did not deceive him; there was a certain correct outlook in his love for Russia: not the peasant community, but the Christian community will perhaps in truth become the faith that the young barbarians are to bring to ancient Rome.

So he says from the heart.

Meanwhile, however, he dies - without any faith: Farewell, corrupt Rome! ... Farewell, native land!

But let no one be deceived by what he says about Goethe in his latest book; the whole of Goethe has become a spectre there. That he does not understand the soul of the people, which has rejuvenated everything, that he cannot look at what Goethe is as a force of the soul of the world, is shown by the fact that he says that he dares to say such words of Goethe as:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German citizen and – if the shadow of the Olympian will have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a respectable son of the respectable Frankfurt merchant.

That about the “Faust” poet!

One understands what needs to be understood in the middle of Europe, and the extent of the understanding that is shown for the German national soul from both the left and the right speaks for this. One day, world history will not only be judged by archives, by what has been printed and written, but also by more subtle characteristics! It was actually with a heavy heart, through tears, through inner tears, that I realized something like an image in front of my soul, the way the forces of Europe stand, because it is so far from the original forces through which the individual outgrows the cosmos.

It is precisely [what that alliance of grand duchy and mendacious Pan-Slavism has done] to the Russian people that this image stands before me. We saw those first August days approaching. I will mention only three images from that time: In Central Europe, the Reichstag. Something characteristic is heralding the coming deeds; it is a purest expression of something infinitely youthful in the forces of the German national soul: the people are silent! There is something monstrous about this. Let us look instead to the west, to the French parliament; look at the speeches that have been made there, and how all these speeches flow out of the power of tyranny. And then we turn to Russia, where we are accustomed to seeing the best of the Russian man in silence: in the Duma, speeches rush, and they all talk in such a way that the words are phrases and everything looks like an arranged theatrical performance of speeches.

And so the European powers confront each other, and I am aware of the objectivity in which I have painfully allowed them to affect my soul. The silence in the middle is a symptom of something that is connected with the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul; from epoch to epoch, it has held dialogues with the most outstanding representatives of Germanness, and the most beautiful products can be traced back to this. The striving of the German people for the spirit has also been carried out in what has happened in our time.

That has always been the nature of German striving. But if you look at it and try to discern the fundamental character, you have to say: this German spirit has not yet exhausted the forces and possibilities for development that lie within it. The soul of the German nation has a rejuvenating power and will always rejuvenate it again and again. How rejuvenating is Fichte's philosophy! Like a stream of folk lore, it flowed into the times of “Speeches to the German Nation”. What brings his ideas to life in a strange and symbolic way is what a new education wants to give people as reality. Fichte knows how reluctant people are to accept the new, and needs a peculiar comparison. It is highly characteristic of his way of thinking.

But spiritual science, from which the attitudes flow that can be used to understand the conditions of the soul of the people, wants to be an active science that courageously and bravely extracts its results. It speaks of the eternal, not merely in abstract words, but as it speaks when the human spirit lives from incarnation to incarnation, so it speaks as it must speak today, about the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul.

Fichte says:

Time appears to me as an empty shadow, which stands over its corpse, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the deceased has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm breath of love; friendly voices of the sisters already greet her and welcome her; she is already stirring and expanding within her in all directions, to develop the more glorious form to which she is to awaken; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or, if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

We can have confidence in the successful striving of the German spirit towards intellectual life, because we see what the German spirit has achieved. This is in the process of becoming and is not yet complete. It is as much a germ as it is a fruit. No matter how unintelligently people speak about Germany, it is not complete and must carry its inner strength out into the world. It is this strength that it has to defend. The time for what the German spirit has to defend will be seen to come. It may be expected. The souls who make the sacrifice of death today will, when those born later understand what the national soul can be for the German individual, they will be able to look down in the days to come on a time that will transform into [human salvation] and progress that which has been bought with such great sacrifices, [with courageous but painful sacrifices]. Truly recognizing the driving forces, it may be said that the German spirit has not reached perfection but will continue to develop:

The German spirit has not reached perfection
What it is to create in the world's becoming.
He lives hopefully in future worries,
He hopes for future deeds full of life; -
In the depths of his being, he feels mightily
Hidden things that must still mature and work.
How can, in the power of the enemy,
The wish for its end may uncomprehendingly revive:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
That holds him in the roots of being, creating?

Hermann Grimm, the eminent thinker on Art, has tried to follow Raphael's influence and fame through the ages down to the present day. Grimm has been able to show that Raphael's creations went on working after the painter's death as a living element, and that a uniform stream of spiritual development has flowed onwards from the life of Raphael to our own time. Grimm has shown how the evolution of humanity has proceeded since the creations of Raphael, and on the other side of the spiritual conception of history it may be said that preceding ages too give the impression as if they were themselves pointing to the Raphael who was later to appear in world evolution like a limb inset in a whole organism. We may here recall an utterance once made by Goethe and from the world of Space apply it to the world of Time. Goethe once wrote these significant words: “What would all the starry world and all that is spread out in Space amount to if it were not at some time reflected in a human soul, celebrating its own higher existence for the first time in the experiences of this human soul?” Applying these words to the evolution of the ages, we may say that in a certain sense, when we cast our eyes back into antiquity, the Homeric gods who were described so gloriously by Homer nearly 1000 years before the founding of Christianity, would seem less to us if they had not risen again in the soul of Raphael, finding their consummation in the sublime figures of his pictures. What Homer created long ages before the appearance of Christianity unites in this sense into an organic whole with what was born from the soul of Raphael in the 16th century. Again, we turn our gaze to the figures of the New Testament, and in the face of Raphael's pictures we feel that something would be lacking if the creative, formative power in the Madonnas and other pictures which have sprung from Biblical tradition and legend, had not been added to the Biblical description. Therefore we may say: not only does Raphael live on through the following centuries but his creations form one organic whole with all preceding ages. Most ages indeed already pointed to one in whom they should find their consummation, although this, it is true, could only be discovered in later history.

The words of Lessing when he speaks of “the Education of the Human Race” assume great significance when we thus see how a uniform spiritual essence flows through the evolution of humanity, flashing up in figures like Raphael. The truth of repeated earthly lives that has so often been emphasized from the spiritual-scientific standpoint in connection with the spiritual evolution of humanity is perceived with special vividness when we bear in mind what has just been said. We realize then for the first time what it means that the being of man should appear again and again in repeated earthly lives through the epochs, bearing from one life to the other what is destined to be implanted in the spiritual evolution of humanity. Spiritual Science is seeking the meaning and purpose in the evolution of mankind. It does not merely seek to portray the consecutive events of human evolution in one straight, continuous line, but to interpret the various epochs in such a way that the human soul, appearing again and again over the course of the ages, must have ever new experiences. Then we can truly speak of an “Education” which the human soul undergoes as the result of its different earthly lives,—an education proceeding from all that is created and born from out of the common spirit of humanity.

What will here be said from the standpoint of Spiritual Science in regard to Raphael's relationship to human evolution as a whole during the last few centuries, is not intended to be a philosophical or historical study, but the result of many-sided study of Raphael's creative activity. There is no question of giving a philosophical survey of the spiritual life of humanity for the sake of bringing Raphael into it. Everything that I myself have experienced after study and contemplation of his different works has crystallized quite naturally into what I propose to say tonight.

It will be impossible, of course, to enter in details into single creations of Raphael. That could only be if one were able by some means to place his pictures before the audience. A general impression of the creative power of Raphael arises in the soul and then the question arises: what place has this in the evolution of humanity? The gaze falls upon a significant epoch,—an epoch to which Raphael stands in inner relationship when we allow him to work upon us—I refer to the Greek epoch and its development. All that the Greeks not only created but experienced as the outcome of their whole nature and constitution appears as a kind of middle epoch when we study human evolution during the last few thousand years. Greek culture coincides in a certain sense with the founding of Christianity and all that preceded it seems to bear a different character from following ages. Studying humanity in the Pre-Grecian age of civilization we find that the soul and spirit of man are much more intimately bound up with the corporeal, with the outer corporeality than is the case in later times. What we speak of today as the “inwardness” of the human soul,—the inward withdrawal of the soul when applying itself to the spiritual or the spiritual becoming conscious of the Spiritual underlying the universe,—this inwardness did not exist to the same degree in Grecian times. When man made use of his bodily organs in those days, the spiritual mysteries of existence simultaneously lit up in his soul. Observation of the sense-world was not so detached and aloof as is ordinary Science to-day. Man beheld the objects with his senses, and with his sense impressions he simultaneously perceived the spirit and soul-elements weaving and living within the objects. The Spiritual was there with the objects as they were perceived. To press forward to the Spirituality of the universe in ancient times it was not necessary for man to withdraw from sense impressions or to give himself up wholly to the inner being of the soul. Indeed in very ancient times of evolution “clairvoyant perception of things”—in the very best sense of the word—was a common possession of man. This clairvoyant perception was not attained as the result of certain given conditions, but was as natural as sense perception.

Then came Greek culture with the world peculiar to it,—a world where we may place the beginning of the inward deepening of spiritual life, but where the inner experiences of the spirit are still connected with the outer, with processes in the world of sense. In Greek culture the balance is between the Sensible and the Psychic-Spiritual. The Spiritual was not so immediately present in sense perception as was the case in Pre-Grecian times. It lit up in the soul of the Greek as something inwardly apart, but that it was perceived when the senses were directed to the outer world. The Greek beheld the Spirit not in the objects, but with the objects. In Pre-Grecian times the soul of man was poured out, as it were, into corporeality. In Greek culture the soul had freed itself to some extent from the corporeality, but the balance between the Psychic-Spiritual and the bodily element was still held. This is why the creations of the Greeks seem to be as fully permeated with the spirituality as that which their senses perceived.

In Post-Grecian ages the human spirit undergoes an inward deepening and is no longer able to receive, simultaneously with the sense impression the, Spiritual living and weaving in all things. These are the ages when the human soul was destined to withdraw into itself and experience its struggles and conquests in an inner life before pressing forward to the Spiritual. Spiritual contemplation and the sense perception of things became two worlds which the human soul must experience. How clearly evident this is in a spirit like Augustine, for instance, who in the Post-Christian epoch is really not so far removed from the founding of Christianity as we are from the Reformation. The experiences and writings of Augustine as compared with the traditions of Greek culture are highly characteristic of the progress of humanity. The struggles of the inward turned soul, the scene of action existing in the inner being of the soul apart from the external world that we see in Augustine,—how impossible all this appears in the Greek spirits who everywhere reveal how deeply their soul-content is united with the processes of the external world.

The evolutionary history of humanity shows evidence of a division, a mighty incision. Into this evolutionary picture there enters on the one side Greek culture, where man holds the balance between the Psychic-Spiritual and outer corporeality; on the other side there is the founding of Christianity. All the experiences of the human soul were thereafter to become inward, to take their course in inner struggles and conquests. The mission of the founding of Christianity was not to direct man's gaze to the world of sense in order that he might become conscious of the riddles of existence, but to all that the spirit might intuitively behold when giving itself up wholly to the powers of the spirit and soul. How utterly different,—divided by a deep, deep cleft, are those beautiful, majestic Gods of Greece, Zeus or Apollo, from the figure dying on the Cross,—a figure, it is true, full of inner profundity and power, but not beautiful in the external sense. Already here we find the outer symbol of the deep incision made by Christianity and Greek culture in the evolution of humanity. And in the spirits of the Post-Grecian ages we see the effects of this incision as an ever more intense inward deepening of the soul.

Thence forward this inner deepening has been characteristic of the onward progress of evolution. And if we would understand human evolution in the sense of Spiritual Science we must realize that we are living in an age which represents a still greater inward deepening, the more we observe it in relation to the immediate past and the prospect of the future in which a cleft, still deeper than that which the contemplation of the past reveals, will appear between all that is proceeding in the world in a more or less mechanical, technical life of the outer world, and the goal ahead of the human soul as it endeavors to scale the heights of spiritual being,—heights which open up only in our inner being as we attempt to ascend to the Spiritual. More and more we are advancing into an age of inner deepening.

A mighty incision in the progress of humanity in Post-Grecian times toward an energy being is what has remained to us in the creations of Raphael. Raphael stands there as a mighty spirit at a parting of the ways in human evolution. All that preceded him marks the beginning of the process of this inner deepening; what follows him represents a new chapter. Although much that I have to say in this lecture may have the appearance of symbology, it should not be taken merely as a symbolical mode of expression, but as an attempt to create as broad a conception and idea as possible, that which can be clothed only in the “trivial concepts of man” on account of Raphael's towering greatness.

When we try to penetrate into the soul of Raphael we are struck, above all, by the way in which the soul appears in the year 1483 in a “spring-like” birth, as it were, passing through an inner development radiating forth its glory from the most marvellous creations. Raphael dies at an early age, at 37. In order so to deepen ourselves in this soul so that we can follow all its stages, let us turn our attention for the moment away from all that was going on in world history and concentrate wholly on the inner nature of this soul.

Hermann Grimm has pointed out certain regular cycles in the inner development of Raphael's soul. And indeed it may be said that Spiritual Science today has no need to be ashamed of directing the attention of modern skeptical mankind to the existence of cyclic laws holding sway along the path to the spirit, in all evolution andalso in that of individual human beings, if so eminent a mind as Hermann Grimm was led, without Spiritual Science, to the perception of this regular inner cyclic development in the soul of Raphael. Grimm speaks of the picture called “The Marriage of the Virgin” as being a new phenomena in the whole evolution of Art, saying that it cannot be compared with anything that had gone before. From infinite depths of the human soul, Raphael created something entirely new in the whole of spiritual evolution. If we thus gain a conception of the gifts lying in Raphael's soul from birth onwards, we can readily agree with the following passage of Hermann Grimm: “We now see Raphael's soul developing onwards in regular cycles of four years duration. It is wonderful to observe how this soul advances onwards thus, and studying one such period we find that at the end of it, Raphael stands at a higher stage of his soul's development. Four years after the picture The Marriage of the Virgin comes The Entombment; four years later again the frescoes in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican,—and so on, by four year stages up to The Transfiguration which stood unfinished by his death bed.”

We feel the desire to study this soul for its own sake because its development is so harmonious. Then however we get the impression that in the Art of Painting itself an inwardness had to develop,—an inwardness such as that expressed in figures which only Raphael could create. It is an inwardness borne out of the depths of the soul experience although it appears in pictures of the world of sense, and it then becomes part of history itself.

Having thus contemplated the inner nature of the soul of Raphael, let us allow the age in which he lived and all that was around him, to work upon us. While Raphael was growing up more or less as a child in Urbino, his environment was of a kind that could stimulate and awaken any decisive talents. The whole of Italy was excited at that time about a certain palace that had been built in Urbino. This was something that imbued the early talents of Raphael with an element of harmony with their nature. After that, however,we find him transplanted to Perugia, thence to Florence, thence to Rome. Fundamentally speaking, his life ran its course within narrow circles. These towns seem so near when we study his life. His world was enclosed within these circles so far as the world of sense was concerned. It was only in the spirit that he rose to “other spheres.” In Perugia, however, which was the scene of his youthful soul development, fierce quarrels were the order of the day. The town is populated by a passionate, tumultuous people. Noble families whose lives were spent in wrangling and quarreling fought bitterly against each other. The one drove the other out-of-town, then after a short banishment the other family would try again to take possession of it. More than once the streets of Perugia flowed with blood and were strewn with corpses. One historian describes a remarkable scene, and indeed all the descriptions of that epoch are typical. A nobleman of the town enters it as a warrior in order to avenge his relatives. He is described to us as he rides through the streets on horseback like the spirit of War incarnate, beating down everything that crosses his path. The historian evidently has the impression that the revenge was justifiable and there arises before his soul the picture of St. George bringing the enemy to his feet. Later on, in a work by Raphael, we feel the scene as described by the historian rise up before us in picture form and our immediate impression is that Raphael must surely have allowed this to affect him; and then what seemed so terrible in the outward sense is deepened and rises again from out of his soul in the subject of one of the most wonderful pictures.

Thus Raphael saw around him a quarreling humanity; disorder upon disorder, battle upon battle, surrounded him in the town where he was studying under his master Pietro Perugino. One gets the impression of two worlds in the town,—one, the scene of cruelty and terror, and another, living inwardly in Raphael's soul, which had really little to do with what was going on around him in the physical world.

Then, later again we find Raphael transplanted to Florence in the year 1504. What was the state of Florence then? In the first place the inhabitants give the impression of being a wearied people who had passed through inner and outer tumults and were living in a certain ennui and fatigue. What had been the fate of Florence? Struggles, just as in the case of the other town, bitter persecutions among different patrician families, and of course, quarrels with the outer world. And on the other hand the stirring event that had thrown every soul in the town into a state of upheaval when Savonarola, a short time previoulsy, had been martyred. This extraordinary figure of Savanarola appears before us uttering words of fire against the current misdeeds, the cruelty, materiality and heathendom of the Church. The words of Savonarola seem to resound again in our ears, words by which he dominated the whole of Florence and to such an extent that the people not only hung upon his lips but revered him as deeply as if a spirit from a higher world were standing before them in that ascetic body. The words of Savonarola transformed Florence as if the direct radiations of the Reformer of Religions Himself had permeated not only the religious conceptions, but the very social life of the town. It was as though a citadel of the Gods had been founded. Such was Florence under the influence of Savonarola. He fell a victim to those Powers whom he had opposed, morally and religiously. There rises before our soul the moving picture of Savonarola as he was led to the fire of martyrdom with his companions, and how from the gallows whence he was to fall onto the burning pyre, he turned his eyes—it was in May 1498—down to the people who had once hung upon his words, but who had now deserted him and were looking with apparent disloyalty at the figure who had for so long inspired them. Only in a very few,—and they were artists,—did the words of Savonarola still resound. There were painters at that time who themselves donned the monk's robe after Savonarola's martyrdom in order to work on in his Order under the influence of his spirit.

One can visualize the weary atmosphere lying over Florence, Raphael was transplanted into this atmosphere in the year 1504. And he brought with him in his creations the very Spirit's breath of Spring, although in a different way from Savonarola. When they contemplate the soul of Raphael in all its isolation,—a soul so different from the mood surrounding it in this town, visualizing him in the company of artists and painters working at his creations in lonely workshops in Florence or elsewhere, another picture rises up, showing us visibly in history how Raphael's soul stands out inwardly aloof from the outer life around it. And there arises before us the figures of the Roman Popes, Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X, in fact the whole Papal system against which Savonarola directed his words of scorn, the Reformers their attacks. Yet this Papacy was the Patron of Raphael who entered its service, although inwardly his soul had little in common with what we find in his Patron Pope Julius II for instance. It was said of Julius II that he gave the impression of a man with a devil in his body, who always likes to show his teeth to his enemies.

How was this possible? We see the contrast between outer life and Raphael's inner being in the early student days in Perugia, but we see it's still more intensely in Rome where his all-conquering works were created in the midst of an officialdom of Cardinals and Priests which had been intolerable to Savonarola. True, the two men were different, but we must nevertheless contrast Raphael with his environment in this way if we are to obtain a true picture of what was living in his soul.

Let us allow the picture of Raphael to work upon us. This cannot be done in detail in a lecture, but we can at least call up before the mind's eye one of the more widely known works for the purpose of contemplating the peculiar qualities living in Raphael's soul,—I mean the Sistine Madonna which is familiar to everybody in the innumerable copies existing all over the world. The Sistine Madonna is one of the greatest and noblest works of Art in human evolution. The “Mother with the Child” hover towards us on clouds which cover the Earth globe,—hover from the shadowy world of spirit and soul, surrounded in clouds which seem naturally to form themselves into human figures, one being the Child Himself. Feelings arise which, when we permeate them with soul, seem to make us forget all those legendary conceptions which culminate in the picture of the Madonna. We forget all that Christian traditions has to tell of her. I say this not for the sake of giving any dry description, but in order to characterize as fully as may be the feelings that arise within us at the site of the Madonna.

Spiritual Science raises us above all materialistic conception of human evolution. Although it is difficult to understand in the sense of Natural Science according to which the development of lower organisms proceeded until finally it reached the stage of the human being,—nevertheless it is the fact that man is a being whose life transcends everything below him in the kingdom of Nature. Spiritual Science knows that man contains a something within him much more ancient than all the beings who stand in greater or lesser proximity to him in the kingdom of Nature.

Man existed before the beings of the animal, plant and even of the mineral kingdom. In a wider perspective we look back to ages when that which now constitutes our inner being was already in existence andwhich only later was incorporated into the kingdoms which now stand below man. We see the being of man proceeding from a super-earthly world and realize that we can only truly understand it when we rise above all that the Earth can produce out of herself to something super-terrestrial and pre-terrestrial. Spiritual Science teaches that even if we allow all the forces, all the living substances connected with the Earth herself to work upon us, none of this can give a true picture of the whole essence and being of man. The gaze must rise beyond the Earthly to the Supersensible whence the being of man proceeds. Speaking figuratively we cannot but feel how something wafts towards the Earthly when, for instance, we gaze at the golden gleaming morning sunrise,—and especially is this the case in a region like that in which Raphael lived. Forces which work down into the Earth seem here to flow into the Earthly elements,—forces which inhere in the being of the Sun. And then out of the golden radiance there rises before our soul the sense image of what it is that is wafting hither in order to unite itself with the Earthly.

Above all in Perugia we may feel that the eye is beholding the very same sunrise once seen by Raphael, who in these phenomena was able to sense the nature of the Super-Earthly element in man. And gazing at the Sun-illuminated clouds there may dawn on us a realization that the picture of the Madonna and Child is a sense picture of the eternal Super-Earthly element in man that is wafted to Earth from super-earthly realms themselves and meets, in the clouds, those elements that can only proceed from the Earthly. Our perception may feel itself raised to the loftiest spiritual heights if we can give ourselves up—not theoretically, or in an abstract sense, but with the whole soul—to what works upon us in Raphael's Madonnas. This perfectly natural feeling may arise before the world-famous picture in Dresden. And to prove to you that it has indeed had this effect upon many people I should like to quote words written about the Sistine Madonna by Karl August, Duke of Weimar, the friend of Goethe, after a visit to Dresden: He says:

“In regard to the Raphael picture that adorns the collection, I felt as if the whole day long I had roamed over the heights of the Gotthard, through the Urner cleft and looked down from thence to the green, blossoming valley. As I looked at the picture and again away from it, it always seemed to me a revelation of the soul. Even the most beautiful Correggios were pictures only of the human; the memory of them tangible like beautiful forms. Raphael, however, remained with me as a breath, as one of those revelations sent to one in women's form by the Gods to bring us happiness or sorrow, like a figure that arises before one again and again in waking or dream life, whose gaze, once experienced, is with one forever, day and night, moving the innermost being.” (Karl August to his friend Knebel, 14th October, 1763)

Another remarkable thing is that if we study the literature of those who speak of the experiences of deep emotion at the site of this Sistine Madonna and also of other pictures of Raphael, we shall always find that they use the analogy of the Sun, all that is radiant and spring-like.

This gives us a glimpse into Raphael's soul and we realize how from amid the environment already described, it held converse with the eternal mysteries of the genesis of man. And then we feel the uniqueness of this soul of Raphael, realizing that it is not a “product” of its environment, but points to a hoary antiquity. There is no longer any need for speculation. A soul like this, looking out into the wide universe,—a soul which does not express the mystery of existence in ideas, but senses and gives it form in a picture like the Sistine Madonna, stands there in its inner perfection quite naturally as mature in the highest degree. Truly, the gifts inherent in this soul represents something that must have passed through other epochs of human evolution, not many such epochs which poured into it a power able to reemerge in what we call the “life of Raphael”. But from what it re-merges?

We see the living content of Christian legends and traditions appearing again in Raphael's pictures in the midst of an age when Christendom had, as it were, become heathenised and was given up to outer pomp and show, just as Greek paganism was represented in the figures of its gods and honoured above all else by the Greeks in their intoxication with beauty. We see Raphael giving form to the figures of Christian tradition in an age when treasures of Greek culture which had for long centuries been buried under ruins and debris on Roman soil were unearthed, Raphael himself assisting. It is a remarkable spectacle, the Rome where Raphael found himself at this time. Let us consider what had gone before.

First there are the centuriesof the Rise of Rome,—a Rome built upon the Egoism of individual men whose aim it was above all to establish a human society in the external physical world on the foundation of what man, as the citizen of a State, was meant to signify. Then during the age of the Emperors, when Rome had reached a certain eminence, it absorbs the Greek culture which streams into Roman spiritual life. Rome subdues Greece in the political sense, but in the spiritual sense Greece conquers Rome. Greek culture lives on within Roman culture; Greek art, to the extent to which it has been imbibed by Rome, lives on there; Rome is permeated through and through by the essence of Greek culture.

But why is it that this does not remain through the following centuries as a characteristic quality of the development of Italy? Why was it that something entirely different made its appearance? It was because soon after Greek culture had streamed into the life of Rome there came the influx of that other element which impressed its signature strongly into the spiritual life that was developing on the soil of Italy, I mean, Christendom. The mission of this inward deepening of Christendom was not that of the external sense element in the Greek State, Greek sculpture, or Greek philosophy. A formless element was now to draw into the souls of men and to be laid hold of by dint of inner effort and struggle. Figures like Augustine appear,—men whose whole being is inward turned. But then,—since everything in evolution proceeds in cycles, we see arising in men who have passed through this inward deepening and whose souls have long lived apart from the beauties of external life, a yearning for beauty. Once again they behold the inner in the outer. It is significant to see the inwardly deepened life of Francis of Assisi in Giotto's pictures for those pictures express the inner experiences called forth in the soul by Christianity. And even if the inner being of the human soul speaks somewhat haltingly and imperfectly from Giotto's pictures, we do nevertheless see a direct ascent to the point where the most inward elements, the very loftiest and noblest in external form confronts us in Raphael and his contemporaries. Here we are directed once again to a characteristic quality of this soul of Raphael.

If we try to penetrate into the kind of feelings and perceptions which Raphael himself must have had, we cannot help saying to ourselves: “Yes, indeed, in the contemplation of pictures like the Madonna della Sedia, for instance, the whole way in which the Madonna with the Child, and the Child John in the foreground are here represented, makes us forget the rest of the world, forget above all that this Child in the arms of the Madonna is connected with the experiences of Golgotha. Gazing at Raphael's pictures we forget everything that afterwards proceeds as the “life of Jesus”; we live entirely in the moment here portrayed. We are gazing simply at a Mother with a Child, which in the words of Hermann Grimm, is the great Mystery to be met with in the outer world. Peace surrounds this moment; it seems as though nothing could connect with it, before or afterwards; we live wholly in the relationship of the Madonna to her Child and separate it off from everything else. Thus do the creations of Raphael appear to us,—perfect and complete in themselves, revealing the Eternal in one moment of Time.

How shall we describe the feelings of a soul able to create like this? We cannot compare them to the feelings of a Savonarola, who when he uttered his words of scorn or was speaking those uplifting, godly words to Christian devotees, was seized with inner fire and passed through the whole tragedy of the Christ. We cannot conceive that Raphael's soul burst forth suddenly like the genius of a Savonarola, or others like him; nor can we conceive that it was swayed by the so-called “fire of Christendom.” Raphael could not however have portrayed the Christian conceptions in such inner perfection if his soul had been as foreign to this “Christian fire” as may appear to have been the case.

On the other hand, the forms in all their objectivity and roundness could not have been created by a soul permeated with Savonarola's fire and winged by the experience of the whole tragedy of the Christ. Quite a different peace, quite a different Christian feeling must have flowed into the soul. And yet no soul could have created these pictures if the very essence of Christian inwardness were not living within it. Surely it is almost natural to say: here indeed is a soul which brought with it into the physical existence of the artist Raphael, the fire that pours forth from Savonarola. When we realize how Raphael brings this fire with him through birth from earlier experiences, we understand why it is so illuminating and inwardly perfect; it does not come forth as a consuming and shattering element but as the reliance of plastic creation. In Raphael's innate gifts one already feels the existence of something that in an earlier life might have been able to speak with the same fire that is later found in Savonarola. It need not astonish us to find in Raphael a soul reincarnated from an age when Christianity was not yet expressed in picture form or in Art, but from the age of its founding, the starting point of the whole mighty impulse which then worked on through the centuries.

In the attempt to understand the soul like Raphael's, it is perhaps not too bold to say something of this kind, for those who have steeped themselves again and again in the works of Raphael and have thus learnt to reverence this soul in all its depth, cannot but realize what it is that speaks from those wonder-works into which the artist poured his soul. Thus the mission of Raphael only appears in the right light when,—to use an expression of Goethe,—we seek in a life already past for the Christian fire that is revealed in the radiance of the Raphael life. Then we understand why his soul was necessarily so isolated in the world and why it was that having possessed to an intense degree in an earlier existence something of the nature of a Savonarola. It was able to refresh and renew all that had arisen in the spiritual evolution of Italy in the 16th century.

I have already described how in the age of the Rise of the Empire, the influence of Greek culture has entered into Roman development and how an inward deepening of the soul had set in. Later on, in the age of Raphael,—the Renaissance,—we see on the one side the reappearance of this old Greek culture that had long been buried under ruins and debris. We see in Rome with the remnants of this Greek culture, the reappearance of the Greek spirit that had once adorned and beautified the city; the eyes of the Roman people turn once again to the forms that had been created by this Greek spirit. On the other side, however, we see how the spirit of Plato, of Aristotle, of the Greek Tragedians, penetrates Roman life in the epoch. Once again the victory of Greek culture over the Roman world! The Greek culture which was emerging from ruins and debris and spreading over the Italian peninsula could not help having a refreshing and renewing effect on a spirit like Raphael's, who in an earlier existence was imbued, to the exclusion of everything else, with the moral-religious conception of Christendom.

If we see the moral-religious impulse of Christendom born in the gifts of Raphael, we also see that element which these gifts did not at first contain rising before his eyes in the resurrected culture of Greece. And just as the city, rising out of ruins and debris, influenced this soul more deeply than all others, so also did the spiritual yields of Greek culture that were unearthed in the hidden manuscripts. Raphael's inborn gifts, united with his “super-spiritual” devotion to everything of a cosmic nature, worked hand-in-hand with the Greek spirit that was emerging again in his age. These were the two elements that united in Raphael's soul; this is why his works express the inwardness proceeding from the post-Grecian age,—the inwardness poured by Christianity into the evolution of humanity which was expressed in outward manifestation in a world of artistic forms permeated with the purest Greek spirit.

We are faced, then, with the remarkable phenomenon of the resurrection of Greek culture within Christendom through Raphael. In him we see the resurrection of a Christendom in an age which in a certain respect represents the “Anti-Christian” element around him. In Raphael there lives a Christianity far transcending what had gone before him and rose to a much loftier conception of the world as it was at that time. Yet it was a Christianity that did not dimly and vaguely direct the attention to the infinite spheres of the Spiritual, but was concentrated into forms that delight the senses too, just as in earlier times the Greeks expressed in artistic forms their ideas of the gods united with the formless element living and weaving in the universe.

This is what we find when we try to form a general picture of Raphael, allowing one or another of his creations in all their sublime perfection yet marvellous superfluity of youth,—for Raphael died at the age of 37,—to work upon us. Not for the sake of any colorless theory, or for the purpose of building any kind of philosophical history, but as the result of a conception born out of Raphael's works themselves, it must be said that the law holding sway in the course of human spiritual life finds its true revelation in a mighty spirit such as his.

It is not correct to think of this course of spiritual life as a straight line where effect follows cause as a natural matter of fact. It is only too easy in this connection to quote one of the so-called “golden sayings” of humanity to the effect that the life and nature does not advance by leaps and bounds. Well and good, but the fact is that in a certain respect both life and nature do continually do so, as can be seen in the development of the plant from the green leaf to the blossom, from the blossom to the fruit. Here everything does indeed “develop” but sudden leaps are quite obvious.

So too is it in the spiritual life of humanity, and this, moreover, is bound up with many mysteries, one of them being that a later epoch must always have its support in an earlier. Just as the male and female must work in conjunction, so may it be said that the different “Spirits of the Age” must mutually fertilize and work together in order that evolution may proceed. Roman culture, already at the time of the empire, had to be fertilized by Greek culture in order that a new “Spirit of the Age” might arise. This new Spirit of the Age had in its turn to be fertilized by the Christ Impulse before the inwardness which we then find in Augustine and others was possible. This human soul that had been so inwardly deepened, had once again to be fertilized by the spirit of the Greek culture which, although it was doubly buried, doubly hidden, was made visible again to the eyes of man in the works of Art resting beneath the soil of Italy, and to their souls in the rediscovered literary manuscripts.

The first Christian centuries in Italy were extraordinarily uninfluenced by what lived in Greek Philosophy and Poetry. Greek culture was buried in a double grave and waited in a realm beyond as it were, for an epoch when it could once again fertilized human soul that had meantime passed through a new phase. It was buried, this Greek culture, hidden from the eyes of men and from souls who did not know that it would live and flow onwards like a river that sometimes takes a track under a mountain and is not seen until it once again comes to the surface. Hidden, outwardly from the senses, inwardly from the depths of the soul was this Greek culture and now it appeared once again. For sense perception it was brought to the light of day from out of the soil of Italy and flowed into the works of art; for spiritual perception it was not only unearthed from the ancient manuscripts; men began once again to feel in the Greek sense how the material is the manifestation of the Spiritual. They began to feel all that Plato and Aristotle had once thought.

It was Raphael in whom this Greek culture could bring forth its fairest flower because the Christ Impulse had reached a greater ripeness in his soul than in any other. This twice buried and twice resurrected Greek culture worked in him in such a way that he was able to impress into forms the whole evolution of humanity. How marvellously was he able to accomplish this in the pictures in the Camera della Segnatura in the Vatican! The ancient spiritual contests rise again before our eyes,—the struggles and activities of those Spirits who developed onwards during the epoch of inward deepening, who were not there in the Greek culture as it reappeared in the time of Raphael. The whole period of inward deepening was necessary before Greek culture could become visible in this particular form, and then it is painted on the walls of the Papal Chambers.

What the Greeks had conceived of in forms only, has now become inward; we see the inner struggles and conflicts of humanity itself charmed onto the walls of the Vatican in the spirit of Greece, of Greek Art and beauty. The Greeks poured into their statues their conception of the way in which the Gods worked upon the world. How this working of the Gods is experienced by man, so that he presses onwards to the foundations and causes of things,—this is what is expressed in the picture so often called “The School of Athens”. The conceptions which the human soul had learned to form of the Greek Gods is expressed in the Parnassus, with its new and significant interpretation of the Homeric gods. These are not the gods of the Iliad and Odyssey; they are the gods as perceived by a soul that had passed through the period of inward deepening.

On the other wall there is a picture that must remain indelibly in the memory of everyone, whatever their religious creed,—I refer to the fresco of the “Dispute about the Mass” which portrays the deepest inner truths. Whereas the other pictures,—in a Greek beauty of form it is true,—express the goal to be attained as the result of a certain philosophical striving, we have in the “Dispute about the Mass”, the fairest thing that the soul of man may experience. Here we find “Brahma”, “Vishnu”, “Shiva” portrayed in quite a different sense,—a proof to us that there is no need to adhere rigidly to a narrow Christian dogmatism. What can be inwardly experienced by every human soul, irrespective of creed or confession, as the “Trinity”, faces us in the symbolism,—though the portrayal is not merely “symbolical”, in the upper part of the picture. We see it again in the countenances of the Church Fathers, in their every gesture, in the whole grouping of the figures, in the wonderful coloring, indeed in the picture as a whole which portrays the inwardness of the human soul in a beauty of form permeated by the spirit of Greece.

And so the inward deepening experienced by the soul man in the course of 1500 years rises again in outer revelation. Christianity, not as the heathendom of the Roman popes and cardinals, but as the wonderful paganism of Greece with its mighty Gods, is resurrected in the works of Raphael.

Thus the soul of Raphael stands at the turning point of ages, pointing back to days of yore, containing within itself all that had developed up to the time of Christendom in the beauty of external revelation, and yet at the same time permeated by what had been brought about by the so-called “education of the human race”, namely an inward deepeningin the reincarnated soul. These wonderworks of so rare and art stand before us like a fusion of two ages, each clearly different from the other,—the pre-Grecian and the post-Grecian epochs, the one of external, the other of inner life. But the pictures also open up a glimpse into the future. Those who realize what the fusion of external beauty and the inner wisdom-filled urge of the human soul may signify, cannot but feel security and hope that this inward deepening—despite all the materiality that must develop more and more as humanity progresses,—must increase in the course of evolution and that the soul of man through successive lives will enter into greater and greater depths of inwardness.

If we now turn to literature and study not as “Art critics” or mere readers, the works of a spirit like Hermann Grimm, who tried with his whole soul to portray the workings of human fantasy, we can understand the depths of inner sympathy with which he contemplated the creations of Raphael. If we ourselves study a spirit like Hermann Grimm with this same inner sympathy, we can understand the significance of certain words of his which express what was passing through his soul when he makes a somewhat tentative utterance at the beginning of his books, in a passage dealing with the way in which Raphael is a product of all the ages. Grimm's formal descriptions of the various works of Raphael do not show us whence this particular thought has sprung. In the middle of other wider historical considerations into which Raphael is introduced, Hermann Grimm is struck by a thought which he records somewhat tentatively in these words: “When we contemplate the spiritual creations of humanity and see how they have passed over from days of yore into our own time, we may well be aware of a longing to tread this Earth once more in order to see what has been their fate as they have lived on.”

This desire for “reincarnation” expressed by Hermann Grimm in the introduction to his book on Raphael is remarkable, and moreover, deeply characteristic of the feeling living in the soul of a man of our own time,—I mean of course one who tried to penetrate into the very soul of Raphael and his connection with other epochs. Surely this makes us feel that works like those of Raphael are not merely a “natural product”; they do not only induce a sense of gratitude for all that the past has hitherto bestowed. They rather give birth to a feeling of hope, because they strengthen our belief in an advancing humanity. We feel that these works could not be what they are if progress were not the very essence of humanity. A feeling of security and hope arises when we allow Raphael to work upon us in the true sense and we are able to say: Raphael has spoken to humanity itself in his artistic creations.

In front of the Stanzas in the Camera della Segnatura we do indeed feel the transitoriness of the outer work and that those ofttimes repaired frescoes can no longer give any conception of what Raphael's magic once charmed on those walls. We realize that at some future time men will no longer be able to gaze at the original works, but we know too that humanity will never cease progressing. Raphael's works began their march of triumph when out of sheer love of them the innumerable reproductions now in existence were made. The influence of the originals live on, even in the reproductions. We can so well understand Hermann Grimm when he says that he once hung a photograph of the Sistine Madonna in his room but always felt that he had no right to go into that room; it seemed to him to be a sanctuary of the Madonna in the picture. Many will have realized that the soul is changed after they have entered livingly into some picture of Raphael, even though it is only a reproduction. True one day the originals will disappear, but may it not be said that they exist nonetheless in other worlds?

The words of Hermann Grimm in his book on Homer are quite true: “Neither can the original works of Homer truly delight us in these days for when we read the Iliad and Odyssey in ordinary life without higher spiritual faculties, we are no longer able to enter fully into all the subtleties, beauty and power of the Greek language. The originals exist no longer; yet in spite of this Homer speaks to us through his poems.” What Raphael has given to the outer world however will always remain as a living witness of the fact that there was once an age in the evolution of humanity when the mysteries of existence were indeed revealed through mighty creations, although at that time men could not penetrate into these mysteries through printed writing. In the age of Raphael men read less, but they beheld a great deal more.

Raphael's eternal message to humanity will bear witness to this epoch,—an epoch differently constituted but that will nevertheless work on through all the ages to come, because humanity is one complete organism. Thus Raphael's creations will live on in the outer course of human evolution and inwardly in the successive lives of the spirit of man, bestowing ever mightier and more deeply inward treasures.

Spiritual Science points to a twofold continuation of life, one aspect of which has been described in previous lectures here, and will be still further described, and to another spiritual life towards which we are ever striving. This spiritual life becomes our guide as we pass through the epochs of earthly existence. Hermann Grimm spoke words of truth when he expressed what his study of Raphael imparted to his feeling and perception. He says: “A time must come when Raphael's work will have long since faded and passed away. Nonetheless he will still be living in mankind, for in him humanity blossomed forth into something that has its very roots in man and will forever germinate and bear fruit.” Every human soul who can penetrate deeply enough into Raphael's soul will realize this. Indeed we can only truly understand Raphael when we can sublimate and deepen in the sense of Spiritual Science a feeling which permeated Hermann Grimm when he turned again and again to the contemplation of the painter. (In the last lecture we saw how near Hermann Grimm stood to Spiritual Science.) It will help us to understand our own relation to Raphael and the sense in which thoughts such as have been given today may grow into seeds. If we conclude with a passage from Grimm which expresses what I have really wished to say: “Men will always long to understand Raphael, the fair young painter who surpassed all others, who was fated to die early and whose death was mourned by all Rome. When Raphael's works are lost his name will nevertheless remain engraven in the memory of man.”

Thus wrote Hermann Grimm went in his own particular way he began to describe Raphael. We can understand these words and also those with which he concludes his book: “All the world will long to know of the life work of such a man for Raphael has become one of the basic elements in the higher development of the human spirit. We would fain draw nearer to him nay, we need him for our healing.”

Raphael belongs to those figures in mankind's spiritual history that appear all at once, like a star, who are simply there, so that one has the feeling, they arise quite suddenly from indeterminate substrata of humanity's spiritual development—disappearing again after deeply impressing their being upon this spiritual history. Closer observation reveals that such individualities, of whom one had at first assumed, they light up like a star and disappear again, actually incorporate themselves into cultural life as a whole, as into a great organism. One has this feeling quite especially with Raphael.

Herman Grimm¹, the eminent art historian, of whom I was able to speak here last time, attempted to trace Raphael's influence, his renown, through the times that follow Raphael's own age, up to our own day. He was able to show that Raphael's creations worked on after his death like a living, unified stream of spiritual development that continues beyond his death, reaching to the present. If Herman Grimm was able to show this, one would like to say on the other hand: The preceding age leaves us with the impression that it already points in a certain respect to Raphael's later entry into world evolution, just as a limb is an integral part of an organism.

In calling to mind a saying of Goethe's, one would like to transpose it, as it were, from the realm of space to the realm of time. Goethe once made the following significant utterance: “How can the human being relate himself to the infinite, other than by gathering together all his spiritual forces, drawn from many directions, asking himself: Is it permissible to think of yourself as the centre of this eternally existing universal order, when it leads at the same time to a persistent circling around an absolute mid-point?”²

In applying this saying to temporal evolution, one would like to add: in a certain respect the gods of Homer, described by him in such a grandiose manner almost a thousand years before the founding of Christianity, would lose something for us, in looking back into pre-historic times, if we were not able to see them as they re-emerged in the soul of Raphael. Only there do they attain a certain completion in the powerful visual expression of Raphael's creations. Thus, what Homer brought forth long before the advent of Christianity joins itself for us to an organic whole through what arose from Raphael's soul in the sixteenth century.

And, by the same token, if we direct our gaze to the biblical figures of which the New Testament tells us and then contemplate the works of Raphael, we have the sense that something would at once be lacking for us if the creative power in Raphael's Madonnas and similar pictures, arising from biblical tradition and legends, had not been added to the descriptions of the Bible. One would like to say, Raphael not only lives on in the centuries that follow him; what preceded him joins with his own creative activity to form an organic whole—even if this becomes evident only from a later historical viewpoint.

Thus, an expression that Lessing³ made use of in an important connection, in referring to “the education of the human race,” appears in a special light. We see how a uniform spiritual element flows through humanity's development and how this shines forth quite especially in such outstanding figures as Raphael. What we have often been able to emphasize from a spiritual scientific standpoint in regard to the development of humanity—concerning the repeated earth-lives of the human being—takes on further significance in contemplating what has been said. We become aware of the significance of the fact that the human spirit appears again and again in repeated earth-lives throughout the various epochs of humanity, bearing from one age to another what is to be implanted in mankind's spiritual development. Spiritual science seeks meaning and significance in human evolution. It does not want merely to present what happens sequentially in an ongoing straight line of development, but rather to assign an overall meaning to single periods. In appearing again and again in earth-lives that follow each other, the human soul comes onto this earth so as to be able to experience something new each time. Thus, we can really speak of an education the human soul undergoes in passing through various earth-lives; an education by means of all that is cultivated and achieved by the common spirit of humanity.

What is put forward here from a spiritual scientific standpoint concerning Raphael's relation to the general development of humanity over the last centuries is not meant as a philosophical, historical construct. It arises rather as a natural outcome of considering Raphael's creative activity from all manner of viewpoints. These reflections are not the result of an urge to elaborate on humanity's spiritual life philosophically. What is said has arisen for me after contemplating Raphael's creations from many points of view—crystallizing quite naturally into what I wish to present. However, it will not be possible to enter into particular works of Raphael as such, since this would require showing such works at the same time. But the total works of Raphael also coalesce in feeling to an overall impression. Having studied Raphael, one bears something of a total impression in one's soul. And then one may ask: How does it stand with this overall impression as regards the development of humanity?

Our attention is necessarily drawn to an important age with which Raphael is intimately connected, the age that coincides with the development of the ancient Greek culture. What the Greeks attained and what they experienced out of their inherent nature presents itself as a kind of middle epoch in the development of humanity. What precedes Greek culture, which is concurrent in a certain respect with the founding of Christianity, presents a quite different aspect from what follows it. If we consider the human being in the time prior to Greek culture, we find that the soul and spirit were much more intimately connected with the external bodily nature than was the case in subsequent periods. What we may call the “internalizing” of the human soul, the withdrawal of the human soul in turning to the spirit, in wanting to contemplate what underlies the spiritual in the world—this did not exist in the same measure as it does today for the times preceding the Greek period. For human beings of that earlier time it was rather that in making use of their bodily organs, the spiritual secrets of existence illuminated their souls simultaneously. A detached view of the sense world, such as we find in today's conventional science, did not exist in those older times. The human being beheld objects with his senses, sensing at the same time, in having the impression before him, what lives and weaves in things of a soul-spiritual nature. The spiritual resulted for human beings from the things themselves, from making use of their sense organs. A withdrawal from sense impressions, in giving oneself over to inner experience, so as to arrive at the spiritual in the world, was not necessary in older times.

If we go very far back in the development of humanity, we find that what may be called, in the best sense of the word, “clairvoyant contemplation of things,” was a general property of the humanity of primeval times. This clairvoyant contemplation was not attained in separate states but was simply there and as natural as sense perception. Then came Greek civilization with its own characteristic world of which it can be said that, though the internalizing of spiritual life begins here, what the spirit experiences inwardly is still seen in connection with what goes on externally in the sense world. In Greece the sensory and the psycho-spiritual hold each other in balance. The spiritual was no longer given in such an immediate fashion together with sense perception as in the time preceding Greece. The spiritual welled up as it were in the Greek soul as something inwardly separate, but as something felt in directing the senses out into the world. The human being became aware of the spiritual, not in the things of the external world, but in connection with them. In the time preceding Greece, the human soul was poured, as it were, into the bodily nature. It had freed itself from the bodily nature to some extent in Greece, but the soul-spiritual held the bodily nature in balance throughout the time of ancient Greece. For that reason, the creations of the Greeks appear as fully permeated with spirituality as what presented itself to their senses.—Then came the times that followed Greece, times in which the human spirit internalizes—in which it was no longer granted it to receive the spiritual element that lives and weaves in things along with sense impressions. These are times in which the human soul had to withdraw into itself and experience its own forces through conscious effort, in advancing to the spiritual. The human soul had to experience spiritual contemplation of things and sensory observation as, so to speak, two worlds.

What has just been said becomes fully evident in considering a spirit such as St. Augustine,⁴ who is barely separated farther in time from the advent of Christianity than we are from the Reformation. Humanity's progress becomes apparent in comparing what St. Augustine experienced and set forth in his writings, with what has come down to us from the Greek world. What St. Augustine expounds in his Confessions, what he shows us of the soul battles in turning inward, what he reveals of an inner being altogether withdrawn from the external world—how impossible does this seem with regard to the spirits of ancient Greece! There we see everywhere how what lives in the soul unites with what happens in the external world.

The historical development of humanity shows itself divided as though by a mighty incision. On the one hand we have the culture of ancient Greece in which humanity holds the balance with respect to the soul-spiritual and the external physical. On the other hand, we have the founding of Christianity, that proceeds from everything the human being experiences inwardly, by means of inner battles and conscious effort—turning not to the outer world in sensing the riddles of existence, but to what the spirit can ascertain when giving itself over to purely soul-spiritual forces. Altogether different are those beautiful, those majestic and so perfect Greek gods, Zeus and Apollo, as though separated by a deep chasm from the Crucified One, from inner depth and power, undistinguished by external beauty. This is already the outer symbol for the profound turning point represented by Christianity and the culture of ancient Greece in the development of humanity. We see this turning point in the spirits that follow the Greek period, taking effect as an ever greater internalizing of the soul.

The inner deepening that took place in this way is characteristic of the further development of humanity.—If one would comprehend the development of humanity, one has to become clear in one's mind that we are living in an age which implies a progressive internalization in the sense of what has been said—whether we view it in terms of the immediate past, or in looking to the future. Thus, we can foresee a time in which a still greater chasm will loom between everything that goes on in the external world, what happens in the more or less mechanical life of the outer world, and what the human soul aspires to in wanting to ascend to an understanding of spiritual heights—in attempting to take the inner steps that lead to the spiritual. We are advancing more and more toward an age of further internalization. A significant turning point in regard to this progress of humanity toward inwardness since ancient Greek times is what has come down to us in Raphael's creations.

As a quite unusual spirit, Raphael places himself as though at a watershed of mankind's development. What precedes him is in a quite special sense the beginning of the turn toward inwardness. And what follows him presents a new chapter in this internalization of the human soul. Some of what I have to say in today's presentation may sound like a kind of symbolic reflection. But it should not be taken as a mere symbolic mode of expression. On account of Raphael's towering greatness, the attempt here is to grasp what can otherwise only be clothed in trivial concepts, as far as possible in broader concepts and ideas.

Attempting a glance into Raphael's inner being, it strikes us above all how, in the year 1483, this soul appears as a veritable “spring-time birth,” undergoing an inner development and evolving brilliant creations. And when Raphael subsequently dies at thirty-seven, he is still young. So as to immerse ourselves in Raphael, in following the various stages of his development, let us turn our attention for the moment from historical events to Raphael's inner nature.

Herman Grimm has pointed out certain regular intervals in Raphael's development. Indeed, spiritual science has no need to be ashamed, in the face of disbelieving humanity, in pointing to certain cyclical laws, laws of a regular spiritual path, also of individuals, since a thinker of the calibre of Herman Grimm—without spiritual science—was led to recognize a regular cyclical development in Raphael. Herman Grimm refers to a work of Raphael that especially delights us in Milan, the Marriage of the Virgin, as a completely new phenomenon in the whole of art history, that cannot be set alongside any previous work. Thus, out of indeterminate depths, Raphael brought forth something that distinguishes itself as being entirely new in spiritual evolution.

Noting in this way what, from birth on, was a predisposition in Raphael, taking account of his progression, we can sense with Herman Grimm how he enters upon certain four-year periods. It is remarkable how Raphael advances in cycles of four years. And if we contemplate such a four-year period, we see Raphael at a higher level each time. About four years after the Marriage of the Virgin he painted The Entombment four years later the frescoes of the Camera della Segnatura and so on, in stages of four years, until the work that stood unfinished next to his deathbed, the Transfiguration of Christ.

Since everything in regard to Raphael's nature proceeds so harmoniously, we feel the need to consider it purely for itself. One then gains the impression that in the age of Raphael a quality of inwardness had to arise, quite especially in regard to the art of painting—an inwardness that had to realize itself in figures such as Raphael alone was able to bring about, born of profound soul experiences, though manifesting in sensory images. And does this not then in fact become part of history itself?

Having thus considered Raphael's inner nature, let us turn to the times and the surroundings into which he was placed. There we find that, while still a child growing up in Urbino, Raphael found himself in an environment that could have a stimulating and awakening effect on his decisive talents. A palace building had arisen in Urbino that aroused excitement throughout Italy. It could be said to have contributed to Raphael's initial harmonious disposition. However, we then see him transplanted to Perugia, to Florence and then to Rome. Basically, Raphael's life unfolded within a narrow circle. In viewing his life, how close in proximity do these places lie for us today. Raphael's entire world was circumscribed within a relatively narrow region, so far as the sense world was concerned. Only in spirit did he raise himself to other spheres.

In Perugia, where Raphael underwent his youthful development, bloody battles were the order of the day. The city was populated by a passionately aroused citizenry; noble families that lived in strife and discord, waged war on each other. One faction drove the other from the city. After a brief expulsion, the others attempted to seize the city again. And not a few times, the streets of Perugia were covered in blood and strewn with corpses. A history writer⁵ describes a peculiar scene, as do other reports of that time that are indeed quite odd. In lively fashion, we see a member of the city's nobility emerge, who, to avenge his relatives, storms into the city as a warrior. The writer describes how he rides on horseback through the streets, the embodiment of the spirit of war, massacring all in his way. But the description is such that the writer clearly had the impression: it is a matter of a justified vengeance being taken by the nobleman. The image in the historian's mind is of a warrior subjugating the enemy beneath his feet. In one of Raphael's pictures, the St. George, we can sense this image the chronicler indicates. We have the immediate impression, it could not be otherwise than that Raphael let this scene work on him. What must appear outwardly so frightful for us, resurrects inwardly in Raphael's soul and becomes the starting point for one of the greatest and most significant pictures in the development of humanity.

Thus, Raphael witnessed a quarrelling, battling population around him. Confusion and chaos, war and strife reigned all around him in the city in which he pursued his apprenticeship with his first teacher, Pietro Perugino. We have the impression that two distinct worlds coexisted in the city: The one in which cruel and horrible things occurred, and another that lived inwardly in Raphael, having little to do with what went on around him.

Then in the year 1504 we again see Raphael transplanted, now to Florence. How did matters stand with Florence when Raphael entered the city? First of all, by their conduct the inhabitants made the impression of being tired people, having undergone inner and outer states of agitation, of satiation and fatigue.—What all had not befallen Florence! Internal battles as in Perugia, bloody vendettas among patrician families, as well as battles with outside forces. But, roiling every soul in the city, there had also been the incisive experience of Savonarola⁶ who had died a martyr's death not long before Raphael arrived in the city. We have the strange figure of Savonarola of the fiery tongue, lashing out against the deplorable state of affairs, the acts of cruelty on the part of the Church, against secularization, against the paganism of the Church. The stormy words of Savonarola reverberate in us if we give ourselves over to them; words with which he captivated all of Florence, so that people not only hung on every word, but worshipped him as though a higher spirit stood before them in that ascetic body.

As a kind of religious reformer Savonarola had transformed the city of Florence. His preachings pervaded not only religious ideas, but the entire city-state. Florence stood wholly under the influence of Savonarola, as though a divine republic of some sort were to be founded. And we then see Savonarola fall prey to the powers he had spoken out against, morally and religiously. The moving scene arises of Savonarola being led with his companions to the martyr's pyre. From the gallows he turned to look down upon the people gathered there, who had for so long been enthralled by him, having once hung on his every word. This was in May of the year 1498. Having now forsaken him, they viewed him as a heretic. However, in a few among them, including artists, the words of Savonarola still echoed on. After Savonarola had suffered a martyr's death, a painter of that time assumed the monk's habit, so as to continue working in his spirit, in his order.⁷

It is not difficult to imagine the tired atmosphere that lay over Florence. We see Raphael transposed into this atmosphere in the year 1504—bringing, with his creative activity, the spirit's “breath of spring” that introduced into the city a spiritual fire, so to speak, though of a quite different kind from what Savonarola had been capable of. Taking account of the contrast between the mood of this city and Raphael's soul in its isolation (joining other artists and painters working in solitary workshops or elsewhere in Florence) a picture emerges that once again shows how Raphael stood inwardly apart from the external circumstances in which he found himself. We see the Roman popes, Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X and the whole papal system that Savonarola had railed against and the reformers had opposed. But it transpires that in this papal system we have at the same time Raphael's patrons. We see Raphael in the service of this papacy. Inwardly, his soul has in truth little in common with what meets us, for example, in his patron Julius II. The latter admitted to appearing to people as someone who “had the devil within him,” and generally had the impulse to bare his teeth in confronting his enemies.

Nominally great figures, these popes were certainly not what Savonarola or his like-minded comrades would have called Christians. The papacy had passed over into heathenism, not in the old, but in a new sense. There was not much trace of Christian piety in these circles, though certainly of the desire for splendour and lust for power. Raphael becomes the servant of this heathenized Christendom. But such that something is created out of his soul by which the Christian ideas appear in many respects in a new form. We see the most heartfelt, the most delightful content of the world of Christian legends arise in the Madonna pictures and other works of Raphael. What a stark contrast there is between the inwardness of soul in Raphael's works and all that went on around him in Rome, when he became the outer servant of the popes. How was all this possible? Already, with his apprenticeship in Perugia, and then his time in Florence, we see how disparate were the actual circumstances and Raphael's inner nature. This was quite especially the case in Rome, where he created pictures of worldwide renown. Yet Raphael and his surroundings have to be taken into account if we are to acquire a proper idea of what lived within him.

Let us allow the pictures of Raphael to work upon us. For the moment, this cannot be done with individual pictures, though one of his best-known paintings may be singled out, so as to come to an understanding of the characteristic soul quality in Raphael. It is the Sistine Madonna in nearby Dresden, which almost everyone knows from the numerous reproductions found throughout the world. This shows itself to be one of the noblest, most magnificent works of art in the history of mankind. We see the Mother and Child float toward us over the clouds that cover the globe—out of an indeterminate realm of the spiritual-supersensible—enveloped and surrounded by clouds that seem naturally to take on human form. One of them as though condenses to become the Child of the Madonna. She calls forth a quite particular feeling in us. In permeating us inwardly, this enables us to forget all legendary ideas from which the image of the Madonna derives, as well as all Christian traditions that tell of the Madonna.

I should like to characterize, not in a dull manner, but as large-heartedly as possible what we are able to feel in regard to the Madonna. In considering human evolution in the sense of spiritual science we transcend the materialistic view. According to the natural scientific view, the lower creatures evolved first, ascending as far as the human being. However, from the standpoint of spiritual science we have to see the human being as having an existence over and above the lower kingdoms of nature. With the human being we have, in spiritual scientific terms, what is much older than all the creatures that stand in relative proximity to him in the kingdoms of nature.

For spiritual science the human being existed before the animal, the plant or even the mineral kingdom came into being. We look back into far distant perspectives of time in which what is now our innermost nature was already there, only later to unite itself with the kingdoms that stand below the human being. Thus, we see the essential being of Man descend, that in truth can only be comprehended in raising ourselves to the supersensible, to what is pre-earthly. By means of spiritual science we come to recognize that no adequate conception of the human being is to be gained from forces connected only with the earth. We must raise ourselves to super-terrestrial regions to see the approach of the human being. To speak metaphorically, we must feel how something floats toward the earthly—in turning our gaze, for instance, to the sunrise in a region such as that in which Raphael lived, to the gold-gleaming sunrise. There, even in natural existence, we can come to feel how something must be added to what is earthly, of forces that we can connect with the sun. Then there arises for us, out of the golden lustre, the symbol of what floats down in order to take on the vesture of the earthly.

In Perugia quite especially, one can have the sense that the eye beholds the same sunrise seen by Raphael and that the natural phenomenon of the rising sun grants us a feeling of what is celestial in the human being. Out of the clouds shone through by the sun-gold there can arise for us—or it can at least appear so—the image of the Madonna and Child as a symbol of the eternally celestial in the human being, that wafts down to the earth out of the extraterrestrial. And below, separated by clouds, we have everything that only proceeds from the earthly. Our feeling-perception can rise to the most exalted spiritual heights, if—not theoretically and not abstractly but with our whole soul—we abandon ourselves to what affects us in Raphael's Madonna. It is a quite natural feeling one can have in regard to the world-famous picture in Dresden. And I should like to provide an example showing how it has had such an effect on some people, in quoting words written by Goethe's friend, Karl August, Duke of Weimar, concerning the ,i>Sistine Madonna, following a visit to Dresden:

With the Raphael adorning the collection there, it was for me as when, having climbed the heights of the Gotthard all day and traversed the Urseler Loch, one all of a sudden looks down on the blossoming, green valley below. As often as I saw it and looked away again, it always appeared only like an apparition. To me, even the most beautiful Corregios were only human pictures; in memory, their beautiful forms palpable to the senses.—Raphael, however, remained always like a mere breath, like one of those appearances the gods send us in female form, in our happiness or sorrow; like pictures that present themselves to us again in sleep, upon awakening or in dreaming, and having once seen, appear to us day and night ever afterwards, moving us in our inmost soul.⁸

And it is remarkable, what is to be found in following up the literature of those able to express something of a profound nature in viewing the Sistine Madonna, as also other Raphael pictures. Again and again we find comparisons with light, with the sun, with what is luminous and what is spring-like in nature.

This affords us a glimpse into Raphael's soul. We see how, despite the conditions that prevailed around him, he holds converse with the eternal secrets of human development. We sense that, in his uniqueness, Raphael does not grow out of his surroundings, but points to a tremendous past. One does not then need to speculate. Such a soul looks out into the world's circumference and does not express the secrets of existence in ideas, but forms them into a picture. By virtue of its inner completeness such a soul is self-evidently mature in the highest degree and truly bears special forces of humanity in its whole disposition,—one that must have gone through epochs that poured tremendous things into the soul, so as to reappear in what we call the life of Raphael. How, we may ask, does this re-emerge?

We see the living content of Christian legends, of Christian traditions, arise in Raphael's pictures at a time in which Christianity had become pagan and given over to external pomp and outer splendour. Greek paganism was represented in its gods and venerated by the Greeks in their intoxication with beauty. We see Raphael giving form to the figures of Christian tradition in an age in which Greek treasures that had been buried for centuries under rubble and debris on Roman soil were being dug up again. We see Raphael among those excavating. Indeed, this Rome into which Raphael was transposed makes a remarkable impression.

What precedes this time? We see, first of all, the centuries in which Rome emerges, built on the egoism of individuals whose aim is to found a community in the external world based on what the human being signifies as the citizen of a state. When Rome had attained a certain height with the time of the Caesars, we see it absorb the Greek element into its spiritual life. We see Rome, though it had overwhelmed Greece politically, now overcome by Greece spirituality. Thus, the Greek element lived on in Rome. Greek art, to the extent it was absorbed by Rome lives on in what is Roman. Rome becomes permeated through and through by the Greek element.

But why does this Greek element not remain a characteristic feature of Italy's development over the following centuries? Why did something altogether different in fact make its appearance? Because, not long after this Greek element had poured itself into the Roman world, something else came, impressing its signature more strongly on what had developed on the soil of Italy: Christianity, the internalizing of Christianity. Something was now to speak to humanity, not as had the external sensory element of Greek cities, of Greek works of art, or Greek philosophy, but by addressing itself to the inner human being, taking hold of this human soul in inner battles. Hence, we see such figures arise as St. Augustine, personalities of a quite inward disposition.

But then, since all development runs its course cyclically, we again see a yearning for beauty arise, after human beings had undergone this internalizing and had lived for a long time without the same connection to external beauty. In the “outer” we once again see what is inward. In this regard, it is of significance when in Assisi the inwardly deepened life of Francis of Assisi. Francis of Assisi appears in the works of Giotto, in which Christianity is able to speak directly to the human soul.—Even if we sense at the same time—the expression is permissible—something awkward and imperfect in Giotto's pictures, in bringing the inner nature of the human being to expression. We nonetheless have a direct line of ascent to the point where the most inward, the most impressive and noblest becomes manifest in outer form in Raphael and his contemporaries.

Entering in feeling into the way in which Raphael himself must have felt, we have to say to ourselves: In looking at a picture such as the Madonna della Sedia it strikes us, in contemplating the Madonna with the Child, along with the Child John, that we forget the rest of the world—forget above all that this Child held by the Madonna could be linked with what we know as the Golgotha experience. With Raphael's picture we forget everything that followed as the life of Christ-Jesus. We give ourselves over entirely to the moment seen here. We have simply a Mother and Child, of which Herman Grimm said, it is the most exalted mystery to be met with in the outer world. We view the moment in serenity, as though nothing could connect onto it, either before or after. We are wholly taken up by the relationship of the Madonna and Child, separated from everything else. Thus, in always showing us the eternal in a given moment, Raphael's creations appear fundamentally complete in themselves.

What must a soul feel in creating in this manner? It cannot be seized inwardly by the burning fervour of Savonarola that feels the whole Christ tragedy within itself, in speaking its words of fury, or in addressing its hearers in uplifting, pious words. We cannot imagine that Raphael could have anything to do with Savonarola's spiritual orientation; or that so-called Christian fire could have held sway in Raphael. Nevertheless, we should not think that the Christian ideas could appear to us so vividly through Raphael—a human soul of such inwardness and completeness—if Christian fire had been altogether foreign to it.

One cannot create figures in an objective and well-rounded fashion if one is imbued with Savonarola's fire, borne along by the whole tragic mood of Christ, feeling oneself spurred on by this. A certain tranquillity and quite different Christian feelings must first have arisen in the soul. Even so, what has come to expression in Raphael's pictures could not have arisen if the very “nerve” of Christian inwardness had not lived in him. Is it not then reasonable to suppose: In the painter Raphael we have a soul that must already have brought that fire with it into physical existence that we perceive at work in Savonarola. If we see Raphael as bringing this fire along with him from earlier earth-lives, then we comprehend how he could be so inwardly serene, so inwardly complete, that this fire does not meet us as a consuming fire, destructive of enthusiasm, but as the tranquil element of creative activity. At his point I should like to say, one senses something in Raphael's natural abilities by means of which, in an earlier life, he could have spoken with the same fire as Savonarola. And it need not astonish us if Raphael's soul were to have re-arisen from a time in which Christianity was not yet present in the form of art, but received that mighty impulse at its immediate inception by which it became effective in the course of the centuries that followed.

Perhaps it is not too audacious, in attempting to understand Raphael, to put forward something like what has been said. For, whoever has learned, in immersing himself again and again in Raphael's works, to revere this individual in all its depths, to view it in its unfathomableness, is only able by means of such extended feelings to comprehend what speaks to us out of the miraculous works into which Raphael poured his soul.

Raphael's mission only appears to us in the right light when we seek, in the sense of Goethe's expression, “in a completed life” [in einem abgelebten Leben], the Christian fire that later manifests as serenity in Raphael. Then we come to understand why he had to place himself into the world in such an isolated manner. And we comprehend how the Raphael we have attempted to characterize—having experienced something “Savonarola-like” in an earlier life (only in an enhanced measure)—now became the Raphael we know from Renaissance Italy.

As already mentioned, in the time in which the Roman Empire drew near, in the Roman period of Greece, an internalizing of the soul had taken place. In the Renaissance, in Raphael's time, we see the ancient Greek culture, buried under rubble, reappearing. Rome was gradually filled with relics of Greece, with what had once beautified the city. The Roman population directed its attention once again to the forms the Greek spirit had created. In this period, we also see how the spirit of Plato, the spirit of Aristotle, the spirit of the Greek tragedians infuses Roman life. We see the Roman world conquered once again by Greek culture. For a spirit that had previously given itself over to the moral-religious view of Christianity, devoting itself in a prior life completely to such moral-religious impressions, Greek culture may be said to have had a renewing, fructifying effect, in appearing out of the rubble and ruins on the Italian peninsula.

Thus, if we see the moral-religious impulse of Christianity as integral to Raphael's innate faculties, what was not there in his disposition appeared in the Greek artefacts then being excavated before his eyes. The statues reappearing out of the rubble, products of the Greek spirit, the manuscripts that were recovered, had their effect on Raphael's soul as on no other. What united itself in this way as a result of his inner disposition—Christian feeling, combined with an especially spiritual devotion to what is cosmic—all this worked together with what was then re-emerging of the Greek spirit. These two things united in Raphael's soul, bringing it about that in his works we have what the time following Greece had generated—the inwardness with which Christianity had imbued the development of humanity—now finally brought to full expression in a world of forms, of pictures in which the purest Greek spirit speaks to us.

We see the remarkable phenomenon, that through Raphael the Greek element arises again within Christendom. In Raphael we see a Christianity appear in an age that, all around him, presents what is actually anti-Christian. In Raphael there lives a Christianity that goes far beyond the narrowness of the Christianity that had gone before, raising itself to a far-reaching conception of the world. However, this is a Christianity that does not merely point vaguely to infinite realms of the spiritual, but assumes artistic form—much as the ancient Greeks had united their idea of the gods with what lives and weaves formlessly in the universe, pressing this into figures that delight our senses.

In letting one or another of Raphael's creations work on us, in attempting to form an overall picture of his works in their exalted, perfect forms, they appear to us as possessing a wonderful excess of youth, for Raphael died at 37 years of age. Not for the sake of a grey theory, nor as a philosophical-historical “construct,” but out of immediate feeling deriving from Raphael's works, it may be said: The lawful continuum of mankind's spiritual life presents itself to us most clearly with such a towering figure as Raphael.

Imagining the progress of spiritual life as a straight line in which cause and effect follow upon each other is truly not in accord with the facts. There is a saying that seems obvious, belonging to the “golden” pronouncements of humanity, namely, that life and nature make no leaps. However, in many respects life and nature make leaps all the time. We see this in the development of the plant, from the green leaf to the blossom, from the blossom to the fruit. There we see everything develop, yet we see that leaps are inevitable.

It is no different with the spiritual life of humanity, and this is connected with various evolutionary secrets. One of these is that a later epoch always has to reach back to an earlier one. Hence, just as the masculine and the feminine have to work together, so must the various Time Spirits work together, mutually fertilizing each other, so that further development can take place. Thus, the Roman period around the time of the Caesars had to be fertilized by the Greek element, for a new age to arise. And in the same way, the Time Spirit that then arose had to be fertilized by the Christian impulse, in order to make the internalizing possible that we see in St. Augustine and others. Similarly, more recently, such an inwardly advanced soul as Raphael had to be fertilized, made productive by the Greek element. Doubly buried though Greek culture then was, it yet reappeared, being doubly “extracted:” for the eyes in that the sculptures had been covered over by the soil of Italy; and for the souls, in the buried works of literature that revealed the Greek spirit. The centuries of the first Christian millennium, on the other hand, had been extraordinarily little touched by what lived in Greek philosophy, in Greek poetry.

Having been doubly buried, Greek culture waited, as it were, in a “beyond” for a later point in time when it could fertilize the human soul that had meanwhile been imbued with a new religion. Buried, withdrawn for outer eyes and buried likewise for souls that had no notion that it would develop further, it actually flowed on like a river that sometimes continues underground, out of sight, far below a mountain, returning afterwards to the surface. This Greek culture was buried outwardly for the senses, inwardly for the substrata of the soul. Now it reappeared. For spiritual sight it was excavated not only in that it was fetched from old manuscripts, but also in that people began to experience the world in the Greek manner once again, sensing how the spirit lives in everything material, how everything that is material is the revelation of the spiritual. People began to connect once more with what Plato and Aristotle had thought.

But Raphael was the individual on whom this could take effect most of all, since in his whole disposition he had fully assimilated the Christian impulses. With him this twice buried and twice resurrected Greek culture now brought it about that he was in a position to recreate the evolution of humanity in figures. How marvellously was he able to accomplish this in the pictures of the Camera della Segnatura. There we see the old spiritual contests arise again in pictures—the struggle of those spirits that had developed in the time of internalizing, that had not been there in the Greek period. That they could be viewed in this way in Raphael's time—for that, the whole period of internalizing was needed. We now see this internalizing painted on the walls of the papal rooms.

What the Greeks had conceived and formed into figures we now see internalized. The inner strivings and inner battles humanity had undergone we see infused with the Greek creative spirit, with the Greek artistic mood and sense for beauty, conjured onto the walls of the papal palace. The Greeks poured into their statues their conception of the way in which the gods worked upon the world. How human beings felt in approaching the secrets of existence presents itself to us in the picture often referred to as the School of Athens How the human soul had learned to view the Greek gods meets us in the remarkable recreation of the gods of Homer in the Parnassus. These are not the gods of the Iliad and the Odyssey but the gods as seen by a soul that had already gone through the epoch of internalization.

On the other wall we see the picture that must remain unforgettable to everyone, of whatever religious confession—as little as one can still gain an idea of it—the Disputa in which something most inward is depicted. The other picture presents what is attained by means of a certain philosophical striving, but in Greek beauty of form. In the picture opposite, the “Disputa,” we encounter the most profound content the human being can experience. And the fact that we do not need to think in terms of a narrow Christian consciousness becomes evident here in that we find the Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva motifs expressed in a quite different way. We have before us what the human soul can experience inwardly of the Trinity—every soul, no matter what confession it belongs to. This appears to us not merely symbolically, in the symbolism of the Trinity in the upper part of the picture. It appears to us further in each countenance of the Church fathers and philosophers, in every motion of the hands, in the whole distribution of the figures, in the wonderful colour composition. It appears to us in the picture's totality. In the beautiful forms permeated with the Greek spirit we are presented with the human soul in its entire inwardness. The inwardness experienced in the course of one-and-a-half millennia arises once again, as outer revelation. In Raphael's pictures we see Christianity, not in the form of the paganism of the Roman popes and cardinals, but as the ancient Greek paganism, capable of creating beautiful, splendid figures.

Thus, Raphael stands at a turning point, at a watershed, pointing both to an earlier age that had preceded Christianity in the beauty of outer revelation, and to what may be seen as inherent in the “education of the human race,” the internalizing of the human soul. Hence, in standing in front of these pictures of Raphael, these miraculous, unique works of art, they appear to us as the confluence of two ages clearly separate and distinct from each other: an age of outer experience and one of inner experience.

Yet, at the same time, in standing before these pictures, they open up a perspective into the future. For, with a feeling for what has been said, who does not sense that—in spite of all the externality that has still to evolve further in humanity's future—this internalizing must necessarily also progress further in the course of evolution? Indeed, the human soul will need to find periods of ever greater inwardness in subsequent lives.

If we turn to literature and study, not as an art scholar or mere reader, the works of a spirit such as Herman Grimm, who spared no effort in portraying the workings of human phantasy, we can understand the profound empathy with which he contemplated Raphael's creations. It becomes comprehensible, when, at a certain point in his work on Raphael we find words that take on special meaning. We see how he stood before Raphael's creations with heartfelt interest. One has to take account of what passed through Herman Grimm's soul at a certain point in his work on Raphael, in the first few pages where, in casting a glance at Raphael's emergence from ancient times, he only modestly touches on something. It is not evident, really, from where this thought comes.—In the middle of wider historical considerations into which Raphael is placed, a thought occurs to Herman Grimm and is written down: “I see before me developments of humanity, participation in which will be denied me, but that appear to me so radiantly beautiful that, on their account, it would be worth the trouble of beginning human life all over again.”⁹

This yearning of Herman Grimm for “reincarnation” in the introduction to his Raphael book is remarkable and profoundly indicative of a particular feeling living in a human being who attempted to come to terms with Raphael and his connection to other epochs. Does one not sense what can be expressed more or less in saying: Works such as those of Raphael are not only an end-result. They lead us to acknowledge not only how grateful we have to be in regard to what past ages have given us. Such works call forth feelings in us such as the feeling of hope, since they strengthen us in our belief in the progress of humanity. We can say to ourselves, these works would not be as they are if humanity were not a unified being whose nature it is to advance. Thus, certainty and hope arise for us if we allow Raphael to work on us in the right way. And we can then say: Through what he created artistically, Raphael has spoken to humanity!

In contemplating the frescoes in the Camera della Segnatura>, we do of course sense the transience of the external work. From these works, frequently painted over, we can gain little idea of what Raphael once conjured onto the wall. We sense that at some point in the future human beings will no longer be able to experience the original works. But we know, humanity will progress ever further.

Fundamentally, the works of Raphael first embarked on their triumphal march when, with love and devotion, innumerable engravings, photographs and reproductions of his works were made. Their effect continues right into the reproductions. One can understand Herman Grimm when he relates that he once hung a large collotype¹⁰ of the Sistine Madonna in his room and on entering, it was always as though he were not fully permitted to enter—as though the room now belonged to the picture as a sanctuary of the Madonna. Some will already have experienced how the soul actually becomes a different being than it otherwise is in ordinary life, when truly able to give itself over to a picture by Raphael—even a mere reproduction. Certainly, the originals will some day no longer exist. But, do the originals not still exist in other realms?

Herman Grimm frankly states in his book on Homer:¹¹ edition, Stuttgart and Berlin 1907, p. 473. We can also no longer fully enjoy the original works of Homer, since in ordinary life, without higher spiritual forces, we are no longer in a position to enter into all the nuances and expressions of the Greek language in their full beauty and power, in taking in Homer's “Iliad” and “Odyssey”. There too we no longer have the originals. Even so, Homer's poetic works speak to us. But, what Raphael gave to humanity will live on as evidence of the fact that there was once a time in the development of humanity when, in the widest circles people were unable to immerse themselves in thoughts and written works, since that was far from being the norm at that time. However, in Raphael's creations the secrets of existence spoke to the eyes of human beings. The age of Raphael was one that read less, but that looked more. This makes it clear that that age was differently constituted. But what Raphael created will continue to have an effect in all future times. Confirmation of this will be what Raphael will continue to say to humanity. Thus, Raphael's creations will live on in the further course of human evolution, live on inwardly in lives that follow upon each other. In undergoing future lives, Raphael's spirit will have ever greater things, of an ever more inward nature, to impart to humanity.

Thus, spiritual science points to a further life in a two-fold sense; a living-on of a kind described in lectures that have been given and that will be spoken of further, becoming our guide in going through earthly existence in ever new epochs. It can be said to be entirely true, what Herman Grimm states in words summarizing what resulted for him from his overall study of Raphael: Even if Raphael's works will eventually have faded or been destroyed, Raphael will still live on. For, with him something has been implanted in the spirit of humanity that will forever germinate and bear fruit.

Every human soul sufficiently able to deepen itself in Raphael will come to feel this. Only in entering into a sense with which Herman Grimm was imbued—heightening and deepening this by means of spiritual science—do we come to understand Raphael fully. We indicated recently how close he stood, in contemplating Raphael ever and again, to spiritual science.—We can understand our relation to Raphael and such thoughts as have been ventured today can grow in us, if we conclude by summarizing what has been said in words of Herman Grimm:

Human beings will always want to know about Raphael; about the beautiful young painter who surpassed all others; who was fated to die early. Whose death all Rome mourned. When the works of Raphael are finally lost, his name will remain engraved in human memory.¹²

Thus, did Herman Grimm express himself in beginning his discourse on Raphael. We understand these words; and we understand him again in concluding, at the end of his work on Raphael:

All the world will want to know about the life-work of such a human being, for Raphael has become one of the pillars upon which the higher culture of the human spirit is founded. We would fain draw nearer to him, since we have need of him for our well-being.¹³

• 1. 1828–1901
• 2. From: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Vol. 1, Chapter 10.
• 3. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729-1781
• 4. 354–430
• 5. Astorre Baglione. See: Francesco Matarazzo: Cronache della Città di Perugia.
• 6. Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), prior of the Monastery of San Marco, burned at the stake at the instigation of Pope Alexander VI.
• 7. Fra Bartolomeo, who became a Dominican in 1500.
• 8. Karl August to his friend Knebel, 14th October, 1783.
• 9. In Herman Grimm: Das Leben Raphaels, (The Life of Raphael), p. 4.
• 10. Phototypie
• 11. See Herman Grimm: Homer's Iliad; 2^nd 11
• 12. From Herman Grimm: Das Leben Raphaels, p. 1.
• 13. Ibid., p. 334.

Often I have indicated how spiritual science wants to position itself in the spiritual life of the present. I have also often spoken about what it can be for the human beings and what it can bring to them, and I will do this in detail in the last talk. I have also pointed in the course of these winter talks repeatedly to the fact that one can understand that on one side numerous human beings of the present, maybe more than they already know it, strive instinctively for this spiritual science out of the unconscious soul forces. On the other side, one can understand that from the general attitude of our time opposition arises against spiritual science. The spiritual researcher also understands the objections, although they are based on prejudice. However, the whole attitude of our civilisation to a possible spiritual science depends to no small measure on the fact that one does not want to realise how spiritual science can basically understand all other worldviews and can completely acknowledge the reasons which are brought forward by this or that side against it. I have drawn your attention to the fact that spiritual science wants to be the large circle which extends the human knowledge of all fields of life, and that all other worldviews are small circles within this large circle, which, of course believe to be right from their viewpoints. Spiritual science can mostly affirm the positive aspects of these worldviews. However, one cannot say this of the other worldviews that one asserts today, in the same sense. Since just on the following point of view one will not position oneself: this or that—may it be put forward for materialism, spiritualism or realism—is to be regarded as one-sided in a certain respect, and only by overcoming this one-sidedness one can attain knowledge satisfying the human being. In its fields, that worldview which must appear as one-sided is often fully entitled, so that it can produce truth at its place. Spiritual science cannot stop there recognising these truths as something all-embracing, but it has to go over to putting them at their right place. That is why we deal in particular in spiritual-scientific fields with the opposition of that worldview which believes to stand firmly on the ground of modern science, and which must—I say expressly “must” -- regard spiritual science from its point of view as fantasy and daydreaming.

I choose a form of worldview that believes to stand strictly on the firm ground of scientific methodology. I want to characterise this worldview somewhat radically. It says that one has to consider the physical, chemical and mineral forces and substances of the human being if one wants to understand the human being and gets clear about the fact that, as any other being is composed according to the principles of nature, also the human being, as the crown of creation, is composed.

This worldview thinks, if it has succeeded once in getting to know all natural principles and substances that work in the human nervous system up to the subtlest processes of the brain, then it recognises, as far as it is scientifically possible, how the human thinking, feeling, and willing arise from the physical laws. It is an entitled ideal of this worldview to understand the human being wholly scientifically.

I know that I must cause, indeed, contradiction from some researchers taking action a little more seriously who already say today that one has left that more materialistic worldview which believes there that the human being is understood completely if he is understood completely according to the outer physical processes. However, it does not depend on that that one admits there or there already that one has not understood the human being if one knows the wholly natural processes that go forward in his nervous system up to the brain. However, that is the point that in spite of this consciousness even in the scientific methods also of the philosophically thinking contemporaries nothing else exists than the view, which positions itself on these natural processes. Since most people who believe to be based on science reject a view as it is meant here as spiritual science.

The view of spiritual science has to admit on basis of its research results that with any thinking, with any research which can survey the processes of the sensory world and can pursue them up to the processes in the nervous system one can find nothing else than the wholly natural human being. However, this wholly natural human being is only the cover of that which we got to know as going over from one life on earth to another which experiences an existence in a purely spiritual world between death and new birth after every life on earth. I tried to show this in the last talk. Spiritual science must realise that this everlasting must remain concealed in the human nature to any philosophy that wants to turn only to the forces accessible to this view of nature. One can investigate this everlasting in the human nature only with forces that one attains with an inner development, as I have described it more exactly in my Occult Science. An Outline and in the bookHow Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. However, even the philosophers who stress the necessity of spiritual life, yes, even the philosopher who has become famous in such weird way, Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1908) who speaks in his essayistic philosophy of the “spirit” repeatedly, restricts himself to this natural human being. He nowhere betrays that he has a sensation of the fact that spirit and spiritual world can be investigated only with the mental forces that certain spiritual-scientific methods bring out of the soul.

Spiritual science is not the adversary of such scientific views, also not of such philosophical worldviews, but it has to show their limits, has to show what they are capable of and what they can show. Concerning this standpoint of spiritual science to the other worldviews, I have also emphasised here repeatedly that it feels in harmony with those spirits of the human development who indeed did not yet have spiritual science. Nevertheless, because they had a thorough inkling of truth from their deepest feeling, they spoke in a clear, understandable way where they expressed this inkling.

This applies to two personalities of the nineteenth century, to Goethe and to the less known Robert Hamerling (1830-1889, Austrian poet)) about whom I would like to speak today. Both poets have dealt with a problem like from a deep spiritual-scientific feeling, but poetically, while I want to stress the spiritual-scientific colouring of this problem.

I would like to ask: could not the thought even arise in a head: what originates really if one invents the human being as a being in such a way that one does not count on the everlasting forces slumbering in the human soul? Which picture of the human being originates if one only uses the natural forces and substances and the physical principles?

The spiritual scientist can assess such a picture only from his point of view. If you develop the forces slumbering in your soul to spiritual beholding, you experience yourself in the soul so that you experience and recognise that these abilities are not bound to the senses and not to the forces of the brain. You experience this way that you are really with your soul beyond your senses, beyond the brain, beyond the body, yes, you face everything that is bound to the body as an outer object. Now you face what you consider, otherwise, as belonging to your ego, your body, as you face the table. You face your destiny too, as far as it takes place in the outer world. You have become a new human being to whom that what you were before has become objective and outside you.

If you consider the human being in such a way, you attain the possibility to assess how much is valid what one can think up as a picture of the human being with only natural substances, natural laws and abilities. One realises that this picture is something very real; but for the human being it is not real in the sensory world, but it is a part of the human being, it penetrates and invigorates the human being.

Those listeners who remember the ambitious attempt eight days ago have heard that the human soul, after it has gone through the purely spiritual life between death and a new birth, enters a new earth-life with forces developed in this life, that it is attracted by a parental couple and that it adapts itself to the inherited forces of father and mother. However, the spiritual researcher realises that the human soul descends to a new embodiment on earth, must wrap itself during the penetration into the physical embodiment in forces that are as it were an essence of the whole physical nature. Before the everlasting human being hurries to his embodiment, he has to attract as it were forces and substances from the spiritual substance by which he hardens the picture that he has developed purely spiritually like a prototype for the next embodiment and wants then to embody himself physically within the line of inheritance. We can say that with the human embodiment an intermediate link puts itself between the completely spiritual which prevails between death and a new birth, and that what stands then in the physical world as a human being before us. In this physical human, we just have what has come from father and mother, and that what comes from the former embodiments, the spiritual-mental. However, in between is, one would like to say, a purely etheric human being, a still spiritual human being that is invisible, supersensible, that contains, however, the forces in himself which are like an essence of the whole physical world process. It is strange: if the human being believes to be on the firm ground of natural sciences and develops a corresponding picture of the human being, he gets to a picture that is not real in this physical human being who contains the everlasting soul. It is a mere abstraction that works, however, in this physical human being, it is that in which the human being wraps himself up before he descends to the physical embodiment.

It is a real being what the human being snatches from the everlasting spiritual life and forces into the life between birth and death what prevails in us between birth and death, what is spiritual, but what lifts us from the physical and what hands over us to the spirit. However, it is not physically visible but to a higher beholding.

Hence, the strange fact emerges that those are not completely wrong who believe to think materialistically correctly, while they form a fantastic picture of the human being completely according to the principles of nature. This picture has meaning for the human being between birth and death, and causes during the life on earth that the soul forgets its spiritual life as it were. However, it does not exist as a thing of nature with mere physical substances and principles, but it penetrates the human nature only. This link between the outer and the everlasting human being walks through the physical world.

Goethe considered this thing as something “supersensible-sensory,” one would like to say, and he characterised it as Homunculus in the second part of his Faust. The materialistic worldview develops fantastically that what Goethe meant with his Homunculus as the picture of the human being. However, this picture of the human being does not exist in truth. It impregnates the human being; it divests him of his everlasting meaning between birth and death and works in the physical-sensory nature.

This latter is the third that comes to the other two. While the materialistic thinker believes to put the most real before us with his picture of the human being; he puts an abstraction, he puts something supersensible. This ideal of modern monism, this Homunculus, that what the modern monism would like to describe as a “human being,” Goethe used it in the second part of his Faust for a particular mission.—I can indicate these things only briefly not to drag the talk out too much.

Faust has experienced what is known from the first part of the drama under the guidance—or by the seduction—of Mephistopheles. He has gone through all phases and tortures of the desire of knowledge, has experienced serious human guilt, and now in the second part Goethe shows how Faust is snatched away from the usual imagination. Faust shall not get the possibility to penetrate farther into the world, so that he works up his way with the usual consciousness again from everything that his soul has experienced. A night is presented to us, it means, Faust's consciousness is removed at the beginning of the second part. From the spiritual worlds, forces are put in his sleeping consciousness in which he does not immediately become aware of that; however, they become effective, as Goethe suggests, in Faust's soul where the everlasting forces prevail, so that he can advance. Hence, spirits speak in his sleep, like Ariel, and others. Therefore, he feels “life's pulses beating with fresh vitality” (verse 4679); he is given back to life and can begin the struggle for existence anew.

I want to refrain from all other things and state only that one demands from him to conjure up the pictures of Paris and Helen. Faust himself gets the desire to behold Helen; and one understands it after Goethe's portrayal that he himself gets this desire.

What a figure is Mephistopheles? He places himself beside Faust as the spiritual being that wants to keep the human being in the outer-sensory world, in the natural existence. Mephistopheles is absolutely a spiritual being, but a being that denies the spiritual world towards the human being. Faust has to demand from Mephistopheles that he enables him to penetrate into those fields of existence where the everlasting-mental of Helen exists. Mephistopheles can give him only the key of this world; since it is the world of the mothers, the everlasting forces of spiritual existence. Now a conversation develops in the second part of Faust where the spiritual-scientific attitude of Faust and the refusal of this attitude by Mephistopheles face each other. Mephistopheles regards that world as nothing into which Faust wants to penetrate. However, Faust replies to him: “in your Nothingness I hope to find my All” (verse 6256). As to Mephistopheles the world into which Faust wants to penetrate, is nothing.—Faust meets the primal figure, the everlasting of Helen in the realm of the mothers. He brings up it. He is immature to face it. I do not want to mention everything that still happens, but only this one: Faust is not so purified as in such striving someone who wants to face the spiritual really has to purify the forces. He approaches Helen as if she is a sensory appearance and the result is that Helen paralyzes him. His consciousness is snatched away from him because of his violent passions. In paralysis, his dream emerges which leads him into the realm where Helen has lived.

Now the big question originated for Goethe: how can one continue the life of Faust poetically? Goethe was no symbolic poet; he was a realistic poet, even if spiritually more realistic. The question originated in him: Faust must be able to face Helen as a human being, as she lived as a human being. She has to descend to the realm of the human beings, she has to embody herself, and Faust must be able to face Helen as a human being: how can one do this in the spiritual-realistic sense?

When Goethe wrote this scene in the twenties of the nineteenth century, he remembered former studies. What he had studied in his youth as spiritual science, affected him more and more. Hence, the second part of this drama is riper all the more what caused, however, that some people regarded this second part as a miserable product of the old Goethe because they had no use for it. Goethe asked, how can I use my spiritual-scientific studies to bring Faust where one has to search the spiritual of Helen? There he remembered what he had read in the book De generatione rerum naturalium by Paracelsus (1493-1541), he remembered the “Homunculus.” Paracelsus declares in this book how a picture of a completely natural human being can be produced, so that one can see him really.—It would lead too far to go into that what Paracelsus shows, simply because his explanations are not at all satisfactory for us today. I want to go into the matter more in the style of modern spiritual science, and not into that what Paracelsus showed.

Paracelsus talks of the fact that one can mix different substances and treat them according to the methods of his time. If one goes into it how the human beings thought in this respect at his time, it mattered not so much how the substances were mixed how they decomposed and combined, but it mattered that the human being stood before the chemical processes and let them work on his soul. The effect of these processes caused a clairvoyance to be produced by other means today. Then one beheld that figure which Paracelsus describes which is really a paradigm of the human being, a little human being, but only radiant, without body, not embodied. These are the essentials in the sense of modern spiritual science that those processes produced that condition of consciousness while the Homunculus became visible.

So Goethe said to himself tying on Paracelsus: this Homunculus is a being which stands between the supersensible and the sensory, namely in such a way that it can bring the human beings down from the everlasting into the physical-sensory world which works in the human being as a force but is not embodied. Goethe moulded the Homunculus into a poetic figure. For he presents a spirit of such kind at first about which one can say in the sense of Faust, such spirits look greedily for treasures and are happy if they find earthworms. Goethe presents such a spirit in Wagner, a figure that is really an ideal of people with modern worldview who look for treasures and are happy if they find the laws of the earthworms.

  To two sides the picture of Wagner arose to Goethe. Since there is beside aFaust book also a Wagner book first; and then there a strange man lived at Goethe's time: His name was Johann Jacob Wagner (1775-1845, philosopher). This man stated that one gets a little human being really, if one mixes substances and so on in the retort according to certain methods. From these two Wagner figures, Goethe melted down a figure, the Wagner of the poem. Thus, the figure of that Wagner originated who stands before his retort and mixes substances and waits until the “well-behaved little human being,” the Homunculus, originates. He would not originate without further ado. Neither in the retort of Johann Jacob Wagner nor in that of the Goethean Wagner a human being would originate, or what some modern scientists imagine as the human being, unless Mephistopheles slipped in the processes, unless the spiritual power of Mephistopheles worked in the background. A purely spiritual being originates in Wagner's retort that way, it is radiant, it wishes, however, to be embodied and it does not lack mental faculties, but it lacks efficiency—a being that the materialistic worldview considers as the human being:

He's well supplied with mental faculties,

but sorely lacks substantial attribute.

So far he weighs no more than does his vial

but hopes that he may soon obtain a body. (Verses 8249-8-9-8252)

Homunculus wants to embody himself, but he is a being only living in the spiritual. Since those present a bad abstraction who search the “real.” However, Wagner can only believe that he has caused the super-creation in reality. He stands before the retort and believes:

It works! the moving mass grows clearer,

the super-creation (conviction) the more certain; (Verses 6855-6-5-6856)

This passage is so little understood in the Faust literature even today that people believe that it concerns a “conviction” (German: Überzeugung). However, Goethe means it in the sense of Nietzsche's “superman” (Über-mensch) as super-creation (Über-zeugung).

Homunculus turns out to be a being that belongs to the spiritual world. Since he attacks Faust immediately in a weird way. Faust lives in dreams of ancient Greece. Homunculus is clairvoyant; he beholds everything that Faust is dreaming. Why? Because Goethe imagines him in the spiritual world, not emerging from the physical world. The human being has it as forces in himself. There Homunculus loses his abstraction. One will even concede to the monists that this abstraction would be clairvoyant if they beheld it in the spiritual world where it is real. Since Homunculus, the human being, as Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899, philosopher) and others invented him exists as a spiritual being and is a clairvoyant being in the spiritual world. However, a person like Büchner would not suppose this. Hence, Homunculus can really become the leader in the regions where Helen shall reincarnate where she shall appear and face Faust. However, Homunculus must appropriate the forces for that only which are in the physical nature apart from everything else.

Homunculus as a clairvoyant being becomes the leader of Faust in the Classical Walpurgis night. There he gets advice from the ancient philosophers, from Thales and Anaxagoras, from Proteus also, how he could get to a natural existence. He who wants so much to be embodied, who “is well supplied with mental faculties,” but even more, “he sorely lacks substantial attribute.” Nevertheless, if once the materialists realise how that what we imagine fantastically could get to natural existence?! Proteus advises to develop through all realms of nature. Goethe's tip to that is great where it concerns the passage through the plant realm, Homunculus says there:

I like the way the air smells fresh and green!

(German: Es grunelt so, und mir behagt der Duft!) (Verse 8266)

The verb “gruneln” is derived from “becoming green” to show the effective fresh life of the plant realm. However, one thing is said to Homunculus: that he can get on this way only to the time when the human being comes into being. He is the mediator between the bodily and the everlasting. When it concerns the birth he must submerge head first into the natural forces, must be taken up in the merely cosmic elements. Hence, one says to Homunculus, experience all that, and that he has “lots of time before you must be human” (verse 8326). Then one tells him:

just don't aspire to the higher places,

for once you have become a human being

you've reached the end of everything. (Verses 8330-8332)

How wonderfully is that in harmony with the mission of Homunculus with the process of human incarnation; since if he has become a human being, he completely goes into the human nature. Hence, one says to him, stay here, do not aspire to higher places (German: Orten and notOrden = medals (or classes) as in most editions). - Here, one must say “places.” For the copyist made a mistake there. This part of theFaust exists only as a duplicate, and because Goethe spoke with Frankfurt accent, the writer understood Orden (“medals”) instead of Orten (“places”). The modern commentators have believed that already the old Proteus spoke of “medals,” one of the unhappiest ideas that slipped in the Faust literature.

Goethe portrays the merging of Homunculus into the elements splendidly where Helen should originate where she should face Faust, so that her everlasting unites with the forces that come from the elements, so that she can enter the earthly existence. The sirens say:

What miraculous fire transfigures our waves,

that break on each other and shatter and sparkle?

Lights wave and hover, the brightness comes nearer,

what moves in the darkness is pure incandescence,

and all is enveloped in eddies of fire.

Let Eros now rule, the creator of all! (Verses 8473-8479)

That is: if the human being enters the physical existence from the eternally spiritual by love, Eros, then one can clairvoyantly behold this merging in waves. “Waves” are meant spiritually. Hence, one says:

Hail to Ocean and the waves

now embraced by sacred fire!

Hail to Water! Hail to Fire!

Hail this strange and rare event!

Hail to Air and its soft breezes!

Hail to Earth's mysterious depths!

To you four, o Elements,

Here we offer solemn praise!(Verses 8480-8487)

That is: Homunculus is now taken up in the elements, and Helen appears in the third act. The reincarnated Helen appears who does not smash Faust.

Thus, Goethe knew how to use the figure of Homunculus poetically. Thus, Homunculus is also in Goethe's eyes that in the human being that leads a completely mechanical existence in which purely mechanical forces prevail. However, the human being is the highest member of creation because these forces dissolve when they enter into him. However, what the human being is not in reality he can be it in his imagination. Out of human freedom, he can get an idea of his ideal and that he can deny his everlasting spiritual which he does not want to take into consideration, and that he can imagine: I am only a being that consists of completely natural substances and forces. Then he can also live in a corresponding manner.

In a time which produces materialism in theory which thinks in theory in the described way, it is not harmless that it has something in its whole attitude that denies the everlasting spiritual and makes just that the natural human being what we have got to know as Homunculus. A certain desire must be there to develop the Homunculus forces particularly; then one has taste to a worldview that regards this Homunculus as the human being.

In the sixties of the nineteenth century, a weird catchword circulated in psychology. One has always believed of psychology that the human beings would not go so far into Homunculism in relation to the soul that they wanted to know nothing about the soul and accept the purely bodily only. However, there the catchword “psychology without soul” emerged (by Friedrich Albert Lange in hisHistory of Materialismup to Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920, psychologist). That is: one wants to study the mere phenomena of the soul life to the details. These are just “events,” one says; but one does not turn to the soul itself.-

Of course, it is in the nature of this Homunculism to deny the soul; since one must deny the soul if one considers Homunculus as the true human being, because Homunculism cannot be reconciled with the soul. A time in which the catchword “psychology without soul” could originate must show Homunculism as a hidden desire of human life. A time, which believes that the human being is only that what one can recognise with the usual forces engaged in the nervous system, shows homunculoid characteristics in the majority of its human beings.

There the thought may arise in a poet: how would it be if I hold up a mirror to the time and show: you imagine what would result from you if you believed to originate only from purely physical forces and principles. He is a poet who takes the catchword “psychology without soul” seriously and says to himself, the human beings have not only said this, but they also lived it. I want to put a human being who is invented exactly after the picture as they imagine him. They do not know only that he is in such a way as he works. However, I want to invent strictly what would originate from the picture of the modern materialist.

Such thoughts worked in Robert Hamerling (1830-1889, Austrian poet), and he carried out these thoughts on his sickbed and sent out the picture of theHomunculus in the world. One knows this poem little today, although 5,000 copies were sold during the first five months after its publication. However, this is also something that is in the sense of Homunculism, of our time.—Hamerling created his Homunculusas I try to show him in few words. I can show him in such a way. As I got around to regarding that as correct what I say about Goethe after a more than 30-years study, I can do it concerning Hamerling too. Since shortly after Homunculusby Hamerling had appeared, I wrote a treatise about it, and Hamerling still wrote to me that I had understood his idea completely.

Robert Hamerling had taken the idea to put once before the modern human being what is contained in the views if one imagines the human being consisting of wholly physical forces and substances according to natural laws only. Hence, he let the modern professor be serious to create a human being according to the physical forces and principles. Indeed, the scientist who believes to construct a worldview based on physical laws says that one is not yet able to create a human being that way today. However, the poet can say, let us assume that this time has already arrived that that could be performed what was theory once. Thus, we see the academic monist standing before the retort, we see him treating the substances accordingly—and the little human being, Homunculus, appearing:

“Bravo, little doctor!” he shouted

Still a second time, while he

Slipped shivering in a little jerkin,

Which was ready for him;

With gracious look he knocks

On the shoulder of the producer.

“So on the whole and from the pure

Chemical-physiological point of view

Considered, is that, my dear,

What you created, a respectable,

Praiseworthy piece of work.

In detail, one could say

Many a thing about it.”

Homunculus continued

And gave some learnt,

Estimable hints.

He spoke much about albumin,

About fibrin, about globulin, too,

Keratin, mucin, and other things,

And about their correct mixture,

And taught his creator

And producer thoroughly how he

Could have made it better.(Literal translation)

Thus he is there in reality—that is in the reality of the poet, as he is invented in the heads of many materialistically minded people. From this materialistic attitude that is given to the “well-behaved little human being” that originates also which this little human being shows as his first tendency. If one looks at the world for the tendencies of the “youngest” people, one already understands how Homunculus can come to such like that:

Gradually he started quibbling

And grumbling in the book,

Which he had in his hands,

The Homunculus. This was interesting

To the doctor, and he wrote

The remark in his notebook:

The first literary emotion

Of a little human being—Review

However, it will not go at all. Since Homunculus grows out of the thoughts of his creator, we say, of his super-creator, and brings many things with him that lived in his thoughts because of the whole condition of our time. He is nervous; he brings nervousness with him. Nevertheless, there his learnt producer cannot do anything with him. That is why he casts him back into the retort, makes him the human embryo again. Homunculus is correctly conceived and born now by a mother, so that we have a not entirely right Homunculus, but one who is only without a natural father.

Then he goes through his apprenticeship. He also becomes a poet, of course. He experiences what many poets experienced in our time: he looks for publishers. He develops a pleasant relation not only to his publisher, but also to his daughter who is promised to him, if his poems find the necessary distribution. Of course, one has “connections”in the era of Homunculism. One praises the book very much; how can Homunculus assume it different! But behold: when the year was over, the publisher had sold thirteen copies only. He takes away the daughter from him, and Homunculus must search his further journey through life.—He chooses all possible ways. He comes to a spa resort, and there he gets to know the customs and traditions of Homunculism, I would like to say, the customs and traditions of modern spa life. Then he grasped the plan to found a newspaper,News for Everything and for All People.

Councillors, councils of state and other councils or also the leaders of powerful, financially strong parties, the leaders of big bank companies and trading companies urge to it and write their editorials and reports.—I beg you to consider—because Homunculus was published in 1888—that with it no satire was intended about something that appeared much later.—However, Homunculus is not content with it; he still aims at something higher. He sells his newspaper to a corporation—this is no satire—and he devotes himself to his other enterprises. Then he becomes a millionaire and lives in a very strange way. I would like to stress that he settles very well in the time of Homunculism. What Non-Homunculism attains by lifeless forces if, for example, anything is supported by columns still belongs to the past times. The big tamed snakes in his garden pavilion hold its cupola. One had trained squirrels once and had imprisoned them in cages. Homunculus does not do this; he lets them work as machines. This is the right Homunculism. Such a thing would already come out if some thoughts existing already today were developed further.

However, even if he is a millionaire he does not arrive at a satisfying life. He did not know a “soul life” because he had no soul. Thus, his existence dissatisfies him extremely, and, therefore, he plunges into the Rhine River. There a being saves him that also has no soul, the mermaid Lurley. Now Homunculus and Lurley become a couple. Because all old worlds are not enough for them, they immigrateto a quite new region.—One would still have to describe the interesting Literary Walpurgis night that is celebrated at the wedding feast of this couple. Some things of it apply to our time, too.

One would have to carry back one's mind only to Hamerling's time, but one would also have to say the same here that it should be no satire of modern conditions:

The host of water poets was

Completely addicted

To harsh world-weariness,

To bitter weariness of life,

To dark melancholy,

And to Prometheic

Liverish pessimism.

The beer and wine poets

Felt much more comfortable in their skin.

To these the world was just

Right, and they suffered only

From one evil: hydrophobia.

The absinthe poets, in the end,

With the wine and beer poets

Shared hydrophobia,

And with the host of water poets

The vulture bite of the dark,

Melancholy-weary,

Liverish pessimism.

Therefore, they were twice miserable.

“Art and literature” are studied rather interesting.

They immigrate into a region not yet sicklied by the faith in the soul. The soulless man and the soulless mermaid emigrate into an Eldorado. This is an Eldorado of some party systems; and something that prevails in a party system today is portrayed brilliantly. I only want to suggest that Homunculus also does not manage here with the establishment of his model state, the Eldorado, even his Lurley is taken away from him by a party man who walks around with the slogan: “nobody shall outvote us!” However, Lurley says, he is a character, and Homunculus has to move on. Nevertheless, he is an inventive head and wants to think the things to their ultimate consequences. He says to himself, you can bring about nothing with the human beings if you want to put Homunculism into reality; nevertheless, they are not able to do this. However, why should I not take the ultimate consequences? Could I not develop the monkeys to human beings? Modern science already teaches that the human beings have developed from the monkeys. I gather the best of them and transform them into human beings rather fast.—He founds an enterprise in which he wants to transform the monkeys into human beings, a quite new realm. Now one tells us about the monkey school:

The teachers of the monkey school

Only complained about restlessness,

Since it was hard to tear

These noble offsprings

From certain habits

Of their race

From climbing up, for example,

Everywhere.

They forgot themselves now and again

So far, in long lessons

To delouse each other,

Attacked the teacher

In wild hordes to delouse his head.-

When the monkeys were now educated,

They competed the human beings

In any field. They were

Very competent at fine arts

Because of their innate imitation talent.

They were unequalled—of course—

As stage artists,

And undertook tours

With brilliant success.

Farce, comedy, operetta,

Parody—all that was their field.

If they made faces, these were:

Showpieces and masterpieces

Of drastic and finest comic,

As one had never seen before.

They had world-famous recitals -

Howling monkeys were the soloists,

Now and then they beat

Human choirs at prize singing.

Baboons, grinning like fauns,

Developed to fops,

To elegant strollers,

Were also at balls smart

Dancers, and the gallant style,

Which they showed perkily

With the women, was partly

Very much after the taste of the latter.

Concerning the monkey women,

They equalled the human women

And soon before also

In the skill of flirting.

Who would understand better

To dress up always fashionably

Than a monkey? They understood

To festoon themselves with jewellery

With tassels, ribbons, and bows...

And so on. Nevertheless, Hamerling thinks that one cannot transform an educated monkey to a human being. Indeed, the monkeys referred to many a “monkey ancestor,” but they only became similar to the humans with one “virtue,” that of conviction. They soon declared that it is actually inferior to be a human being; because these have not even become “monkeys.” This led to the fact that the elected monkey rector, the monkey “Doctor Krallfratz” replaced Homunculus. Thus, Doctor Krallfratz replaced him. Nevertheless, the monkeys had less luck with it. Indeed, the human beings did not cope with the monkeys that had become human beings; but in wild regions the human beings living still there in the primordial state coped with them, they simply killed the monkeys.

Now a chapter comes which one held against Hamerling very much.—Hamerling did not want to go among the anti-Semites; he strictly protested against it where he made Homunculus the leader of the Jews immigrating to Palestine in the eighth song. They do no longer stand it here under the today's conditions.

One should assume that this is something noticeable in a time that knows the attempts of Zionism. However, it is important what arises now for Homunculus from it, the Jews crucify him because they do not endure being together with him. When he is attached to the cross, only Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, visits him. He frees him from his bonds, and they both have to walk on together.

Indeed, Homunculus has thought up to the ultimate consequence what he believes to have gained from modern science. However—and this should appear with people who deal with ideological questions—he has not really dealt, actually, with science. He begins now to deal with scientific problems. Indeed, there he manages to win a big part of humanity for an idea which appeared first with the philosopher of the unconscious out of pessimism which is also a kind of Homunculism in certain sense: from Eduard von Hartmann's pessimistic philosophy. Not many people still know today what pessimism has to announce to the human beings: oh, the world is bad, as bad as possible, and it would be the best of all to escape this bad world. It is necessary that one realises that the world originated from the will, and if all human beings grasped the volition to finish their existence, world and life would be finished by the united volition of all. Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869) describes in detail that it were possible to eliminate humanity from the world by a common volition.

Homunculus founds a society not only of human beings but also of animals under this viewpoint. One holds congresses and speeches, and so on. In the end, a time is determined at which all human beings should decide simultaneously: now we want to exist no longer. Besides, even the earth should perish. All agree; the day, the hour approaches, but it stops the sun only. What had happened? Homunculus and Lurley had wished a child; however, they could not get it in Eldorado. Hence, they accepted two children of the prehistoric humans living there; they called them Eldo and Dora. However, both could not cope with Homunculism. When all human beings gather to carry out their decision, Eldo and Dora meet again after long separation, they fall in love, and therefore they come too late. They were absent when the whole humanity gathered at the agreed time, and all efforts were pointless. Homunculus himself has built up those who ruin his decision. Oh, Homunculism will create the “Eldo” and “Dora” in manifold way from itself who come too late if Homunculism wants to take the ultimate consequences. Then the sun of spiritual life, of spiritual science rises!

Nevertheless, in the end Homunculus must reach something from his science. He builds, after he has investigated all forces of nature, a huge telescope with which he can see into the most distant regions of the universe, all that is increased hugely with which the modern worldview has grown up. Except this huge telescope, he constructs a huge stethoscope and a gigantic smelling pipe; and, one can say, he still builds everything that one can obtain from the mechanical forces! From these mechanical forces in the most modern style, he builds a gigantic airship. I note once again: in 1887, Robert Hamerling in his Homunculus writes the history of the dirigible airship! With this dirigible airship, Homunculus leaves the earth sphere. He can race along with his airship faster than the light does. But he is not content with that what he is able to do: he can travel around with his airship in the cosmic space, can look out with his huge telescope into the world of the stars, he can listen to the earth with his huge stethoscope, and he speaks with a gigantic megaphone down to the human beings. There he comes into a thundercloud, lightning strikes his airship, it cannot destroy the rudder, the engine, but it destroys its controllability! Thus, Homunculus is handed over with his airship to the elementary forces. He can still take one thing along: when he approaches the earth once again, he discovers the corpse of Lurley and carries it with him on his dirigible gigantic airship.—Hamerling closes his epic with the words:

Whom the holy nature,

The mysterious mother,

Gave life by love,

Gave life in love.

She also refuses death to him,

The happiest death, above all, is

Dying down in love.

The vast universe has for him

No grave of blissful rest,

No place of everlasting peace.

Who can say where

And how long with Homunculus

And the mermaid that joins him

The ruling fate does chase

The charred gigantic airship

In the whirl of iron laws,

Of substances and forces

On roads without barriers?

Sometimes in starry nights

Sunday's children still see

That wreck as a dark planet

High above in immeasurable distance,

And shuddering they suspect

The fate of the forever restless.

Hamerling showed in his way that that what Homunculism invents cannot belong to the world in which the human soul lives but only to the completely mechanical forces. Mechanical forces of nature tear him away. Indeed, the poet could have this idea that the modern human being who develops his completely natural human ideal looks, actually, only at that in himself what is abstraction, what is something unreal and belongs to the completely natural elements. Hamerling means that what also Goethe said where his Homunculus disintegrates in the elements:

Hail to Air and its soft breezes!

Hail to Earth's mysterious depths!

To you four, o Elements,

Here we offer solemn praise!(Verses 8484-8487)

Whereas Goethe's Homunculus contributes his forces to the incarnation of Helen, the Homunculus of Hamerling as soulless being, as the representative of that human ideal that denies the soul has to be taken up in the elements of the universe.

One can say, Hamerling had the intention—I leave it to others to assess whether he was successful or not—to hold up a mirror to that modern attitude which wants to know nothing of the spirit and conjures up a human ideal divested of spirit before itself. It is another question whether the reflection is also recognised. However, it is something that is not real in the physical nature that rightly those can deny who just put up it. Strange disaster! Goethe solves the riddle somewhat. He reminds of the other word:

Simple folk never sense the devil's presence

not even when his hands are on their throats. (Verses 2181-2182)

Wagner who produces Homunculus in his retort also does not notice that the devil is that who produces him, actually. Since Mephistopheles brings in the spiritual forces. It is an inspiration of the “father of all obstacles” of that what is a product of modern science what materialism wants to put as the modern human being.

I read about Homunculus a third time. I say it somewhat bashfully; however, I do not want to shrink back from a remark that forced on me already once. I read a book of the learnt economist Werner Sombart (1863-1941) who describes the modern economic human being. Read the final chapter about the bourgeois; it is written very interesting; and at last, the modern economic human being appears whom the forces seize like with tentacles that prevail in the modern economic life and who is driven from enterprise to enterprise. As the last, he has also lost religion, Sombart says. “Religion has become business.” The modern human being is in Sombart's humanity. Someone who knows something of it has to say, does he not exist; do not the economists describe him?

It arises from everything that one has to overcome Homunculism by the living understanding of the spiritual life. As Homunculism cannot see many things, it also does not see to what its own forces lead him. The poets tried to show it, and spiritual science completely feels in harmony with such poets who felt out of their inkling what spiritual science has to found anew. What spiritual science can be as a treasure for life to the human being that it can grasp his soul that it is the only true overcomer of any Homunculism; I show this in the next talk. Today I just wanted to bring into view how spirits who looked with open eyes and sense recognised that what prevails in the conditions of the presence as Homunculism.

I believe that one understands Hamerling on the ground of spiritual science; one understands just the last words:

Who can say where

And how long with Homunculus

And the mermaid that joins him

The ruling fate does chase

The charred gigantic airship

In the whirl of iron laws,

Of substances and forces

On roads without barriers?

Sometimes in starry nights

Sunday's children still see

That wreck as a dark planet

High above in immeasurable distance,

And shuddering they suspect

The fate of the forever restless.

Nevertheless, you permit that I use a well-known and somewhat changed proverb compared with this quotation: why should we look with the eyes of the Sunday's child at the wreck in the vast universe? Homunculus is so close that even Sombart can describe him! Homunculus is very close to the modern human being, and one can only hope that many anticipating and sighted souls become Sunday's children in this respect by spiritual science that recognise the very close Homunculism, the wreck of a worldview. More and more of such Sunday's children will be there. And what also—let me use this expression—Homunculism is able to argue against spiritual science, spiritual science will give humanity what it cannot lack, what it craves for and what it must hope for: the soul, and with the soul the spiritual life. Hence, one has not to be worried about the future of spiritual science.

This will be the topic of the last of these winter talks.

In this lecture, Rudolf Steiner indicates the magnitude of the questions at stake and suggests that a mechanisation of the spirit, vegetation of the soul, and animalisation of the body will take place unless humanity is able to find a new relationship to the spirit. It is lecture 13 of 14 from the lecture series: Reorganization of the Social Organism.

Every individual has the feeling that part of his being is super-sensible, whatever function it has within his soul. And anthroposophical spiritual science—the name applying to what I have been presenting for many years—has something it wants to say about this feeling becoming an inner scientific certainty in the consciousness of present-day mankind. However, there are still all manner of prejudices against the anthroposophical approach to knowledge of man's super-sensible being and to knowledge of the super-sensible world altogether. But anthroposophy cannot speak about the super-sensible being of man in the kind of way people would still like to hear it spoken of in many circles today. For we should imagine, in fact, we should be certain that speaking about it in that way would not satisfy people's present-day aspirations for knowledge, which are none the less intense although they may still be unconscious. Nowadays when people pass judgment on one or another aspect of anthroposophy you constantly hear the remark that anthroposophy is difficult to understand. They say that anthroposophy obtains its knowledge from regions one does not need to go to in order to reach the super-sensible. They emphasise the difference between anthroposophy's search for knowledge and ‘simple faith’ based on the creed and the Bible, and they keep on stressing that anyone who has found the inner strength of this ‘simple faith’ does not need anthroposophical spiritual science.

If anthroposophy were to speak along the lines that people nowadays call ‘simple faith,’ it would certainly consider it was failing to do justice to the deepest aspirations of the times. It would have to admit, in that case, that although it was presenting a point of view still popular with many people who find it less difficult to understand than anthroposophy, this point of view is nevertheless no longer appropriate for the real soul needs of present-day mankind. I wanted this to be said because it is just from this direction that objections are continually being raised against the views which arise from a valid consideration of man's present-day needs, views which are held by the kind of spiritual science that will be spoken of here. This kind of spiritual science is convinced that certain inter-relationships exist about which many people nowadays have the most detrimental illusions. Today, however, we are living in an age that has a long way to go before confusion and chaos are over. We are entering a difficult period of human evolution. Anyone able to look more deeply into the evolution of mankind and seeing the amount of elemental unrest felt today throughout the whole of the civilised world, of which everything of the nature of inner tensions is only the ripples on the surface, knows that this has a mysterious connection with that obstinate attitude of ‘simple faith’ that wants to rely solely on the creed and the Bible. The parts of man's being that are attracted by this so-called ‘faith’ shut him off from those very forces that could bring order into chaos and confusion at the present stage of human evolution. If those people who speak in the way I have indicated would now deepen their knowledge somewhat, they would have to see all that is bringing mankind into such terrible conflict and chaos. Then they would have to admit that they now lack certain forces that they failed to develop because of their determination not to go beyond their so-called ‘simple faith,’ which they and others find so convenient. They would also have to admit that there is an inner relationship between the unrest of today and this harping on ‘simple faith.’ A causal connection there certainly is, today's elemental restlessness being the result of this obdurate harping.

I am not speaking out of subjective feelings but out of the very kind of knowledge I would like to tell you more about today, namely an inner scientific perception. It is this that has moved anthroposophy to bring knowledge of the super-sensible down from spirit heights. Insofar as the so-called believers in a simple faith point to the super-sensible, their knowledge has also come to them from spirit heights. But they have no wish at all to ascend to these heights.

This had to be said first of all, because today, in particular, what I will have to say concerning the super-sensible being of man will need to be brought into connection with a number of those spiritual scientific facts that people on the one hand find really incomprehensible—though if they were to go into them more thoroughly they would find they absolutely accorded with common sense; and that people on the other hand consider unnecessary, because they do not find they accord with the ‘simple faith’ they think they ought to advocate. I attempted the day before yesterday to characterise the paths by which the kind of spiritual science we mean attains to knowledge. On that occasion I began by saying that on the whole men of present times have very little desire to know about what is taking place unconsciously in the depths of their being. On the one hand people think the body is something external to themselves, and that they can gain knowledge of it either by observing it with sense perception or by considering it according to the outlook laid down by natural science. On the other hand they think that their thinking, sense perception, feeling and willing comprise the whole of their inner being. However, the path of knowledge I indicated the day before yesterday shows that the life of the external body, on the one hand, and the soul experiences of thinking, feeling and willing we have in ordinary consciousness, on the other, do not comprise the whole of man's being. The essential point is that man as spiritual investigator does not stop at the level of ordinary consciousness but takes the development of his soul into his own hands, as it were. In the realm of thought, in particular, he raises thinking consciously onto a higher level than in ordinary life, and in the other direction makes his will nature consciously into an object of self-education. Thus the development of soul forces beyond the level of ordinary life is the only thing that can lead in an anthroposophical sense to knowledge of the super-sensible world.

Now what is this development of thinking? It consists of making human thinking or human visualising stronger than it is in ordinary life, and doing so in a completely systematic way based on the experiences of man's inner soul nature. In ordinary life our thinking or visualising is merely a spectator. And man is conscious of the fact that he actually thinks best in ordinary life when he allows his experiences of life or of external nature to work on him in such a way that he forms his mental pictures as a passive spectator. With the methods described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you can bring activity into the world of thought. You will bring such activity into the world of thought that you will be conscious that you are not passive whilst you think, but are as active as you are when you use your limbs, even though this is an inner activity. Will must be brought into thinking, the kind of will, however, that does not make the thinking arbitrary, but adapts it to the phenomena of the world. So it is a particularly good preparation for the spiritual investigator if he precedes his spiritual scientific endeavours with a thoroughly disciplined study in the natural scientific method, thus training himself not to think arbitrarily but according to the phenomena of nature itself. But he also has to free himself from this mere looking at nature. His newly acquired capacity of systematic thinking and of observing natural phenomena must now be developed as a thought activity independent of physical phenomena. A spiritual scientific training of thinking is an activating of thinking. This is a fact that many people still disbelieve today—we are only at the beginning of spiritual scientific knowledge—namely the fact that man's thinking and whole activity of mental picturing really takes on quite a different character than it has in everyday life.

If we think back to the dreamlike mental images of early childhood and compare these with the clear thinking of adulthood, we find that man's inner life of soul has undergone a change. A similar change takes place in anyone who develops his thinking in the way we have described and progresses from ordinary thinking to active thinking. He feels as though he has awakened from the normal condition of existence, and, provided we do not use the word in a dubious mystical sense, we can certainly say that this activated thinking ‘awakens’ man.

By learning to use this active thinking man acquires an entirely new way of ‘seeing’ things, a new way of seeing the qualities of the human body, to begin with. Active thinking ascends to the kind of seeing in which the human body appears in quite a new way. Above all, a tremendous difference is to be seen between the form of man's head organisation and the organisation that comes to expression in man's mobile limbs and everything that is connected with these. By means of the kind of seeing that active thinking opens up we come to realise that the human head is of an entirely different character, even in its bodily nature, from the rest of the body, particularly the limb organisation. Inner perception shows us how thinking, especially this activated thinking, is related to the whole nature of the human head. We learn to know in a new way what the human body really is. For as our soul development progresses by means of this active thinking there enters consciously into this active thinking the kind of life experience that is not solely of the type that enters ordinary thinking or visualising.

Life experiences that enter ordinary thinking or visualising have a certain peculiarity. We experience the world within this ordinary visualising. We experience it through our sense perceptions and the thoughts that come to meet them. But we keep a bit of this experience back for ourselves, too. We would not have our whole human nature within ourselves if each external impression did not leave behind it the possibility of our remembering it. It is just this memory that keeps our whole human personality intact, and we only have to think of the devastation wrought in the human personality by any kind of loss of memory to realise what the power of memory means for the cohesion of the human personality in ordinary life. But the force that enables us to keep memories alive, those memories acquired by opening ourselves to the outer world and forming mental images of it via our sense perception, this force remains unconscious. This is something that man carries out unconsciously. But when it comes to the experiences of active, super-sensible thinking, it is different. It would be quite impossible to bring what is acquired in a really super-sensible way, through active thinking, into any sort of connection with the human personality if we were dependent on the activity that works unconsciously within us. Something we have to learn about the acquisition of super-sensible knowledge is that we are not taking something unconsciously into the body by means of which we can later on awake a memory, on the contrary the imprinting of something in the physical body, the taking in of it, that normally takes place as an unconscious activity and works on as memory, has to be carried out consciously by the spiritual investigator. The higher, super-sensible experience gained by activated thinking would never come in place of an absolutely dreamy experience if we could not acquire the capacity to introduce this super-sensible experience to the body consciously.

We can only introduce it, however, to the head organisation. But then this head organisation teaches us something that eludes ordinary science, but which sheds great light on the mystery of man's being. We discover that when we make a conscious imprint of what we experience in active thinking we are constantly bringing about a process in the human head that is not an intensification of life but a breaking down of life, a partial dying. This is a significant and moving experience acquired through spiritual science: In order to remember super-sensible knowledge, we have to imprint it into our head organisation, and it is immediately evident that this imprinting does not bring about an enlivening process but a process of partial dying, a breaking down of the head organisation's life processes. This teaches us how the bodily head organisation actually functions in man. We discover something that is normally not known because it remains unconscious, namely that our whole thinking activity or mental imagery is not something that comes from forces of life, as materialists believe, but something that comes from the damping down of the life of the head. It arises because whilst our soul is active our head is constantly in a state of partial dying. We also discover a fact that strikes a man of today as being absurd: if the thinking activity of the head were to spread into the rest of man's body, he would immediately die.

Thus spiritual science teaches us that the death-bringing principle is constantly at work in part of man's bodily nature. We learn that because our head is organised that way, death is at work in us throughout our life. You see, this approach, that people in many circles today imagine has nothing useful to offer, leads to the kind of conceptions that completely contradict the usual views. We find that this imprinting that I have just described as a conscious process which must be carried out by active thinking, cannot actually directly imprint into man's physical organisation the super-sensible world where the experiences have been undergone. We find out the real fact that eludes external sense observation. We discover that incorporated into the ordinary life of the senses is what I took the liberty, in my books on spiritual science, to call the etheric body or body of formative forces. We discover a delicate body of light between the activity of active thinking and man's physical body, particularly in the head organisation. This finer body is the formative force—a thing that modern natural science makes fun of—underlying the physical body, and it is discovered in this way by super-sensible sight, which at this stage we can call an Imagination. We discover a higher, super-sensible member of man's being. At this point we experience an extraordinarily shattering phenomenon. When we imprint our super-sensible experiences into our etheric body and on into our physical body, we feel as though we were no longer master of our ego. We thought our ego filled our soul being through and through, but now it feels as though it were being sucked into the body.

The way to overcome this phenomenon is to have other soul exercises going parallel with the activating of thinking. These outer exercises are to do with disciplining the will. Although I characterised them the day before yesterday, I want to refer to them again briefly. I described how man changes from one week to the next, from one hour to the next, from one year to the next. We know we are becoming a different person. Our experiences are not the kind of thing we have, but the kind of thing that is perpetually making us into a different person. But nowadays an unconscious activity is also at work here. Present-day man gives himself up to external experiences. If he goes so far as to observe his inner being to any extent, he may notice that on the whole he is becoming a different person from week to week, year to year, and decade to decade; that his soul constitution is changing. But he does not take this development of his soul constitution in hand. This, however, the spiritual investigator has to do. He has to work on himself in such a way that his own will controls the progress he makes from one year to the next and from one decade to the next, and this also has to be systematic. He has to practise self-discipline and self-education systematically and fully consciously, not merely arbitrarily or according to the pattern of ordinary more or less unconscious existence. He has to bring under the control of his own will what otherwise takes place in us involuntarily.

This calls forth another experience of a kind that is very far removed from present-day consciousness; we realise that we have to put aside a scientific prejudice that prevails nowadays in a particular realm of science and has taken general hold of people's minds. This scientific view—which I want to mention because it could be the very thing that might make my present argument intelligible—is that man has two kinds of nerves: the so-called sensory nerves and the motor nerves. The sensory nerves run from our sense organs (so people believe) or from the surface of the skin to the nerve centre and convey perceptions in the same way as telegraph wires. The so-called motor nerves, the will nerves, go out from the nerve centre. A kind of demonic being is imagined as residing in the central nervous system, although of course present-day science will not admit this, and he is supposed to change what comes in through the telegraph wire nerves from the senses to the telegraph exchange into will through the motor nerves, the will nerves. People have thought out such beautiful theories that are really extremely clever, especially those derived from the terrible illness tabes, to explain this theory of the two kinds of nerves. Nevertheless this theory is nothing else than the result of a lack of knowledge of super-sensible man. It would lead too far for me to go into it now—although tabes proves it if we observe it correctly—but there is no difference between the sensory and the motor nerves. The same as with the so-called sensory nerves, the function of which is to convey external perceptions, the only function of the so-called motor nerves is to convey internal perceptions when we walk or move our arms. The motor nerves are sensory nerves too, only their function is to perceive our movements.

The reason why people believe the motor nerves to be the bearer of the will is only because they have no idea what is the real bearer of the will. We only discover what this is when we really practise the kind of self-discipline of the will I was speaking about: become actively engaged in self-education and become at the same time independent of what the body does with us, so to speak. Then we discover that it is not the motor nerves that create will, for they only perceive its movements, but that it is created by a third member of man's being, a super-sensible member that we could actually call the soul. I have called it the astral body in my books, though people do not like the term yet. Again it is by means of direct vision, acquired through this self-disciplining of the will, that we get to know this super-sensible member of man's being; and we discover that it is this ‘soul body,’ if I may call it that, that is the soul and spirit entity underlying all the bodily movements arising out of will. Nerves are there only to convey the perception of movement. If we take this disciplining of the will to further stages, however, we must then ascend from the level of imaginative knowledge, to which I have just referred, to those of Inspiration and Intuition, as I call them in the book just mentioned. We then discover this soul body to be a higher member of man's being than the etheric body or body of formative forces. We find, however, that we cannot experience this soul body in ourselves but only when we are outwardly active and when we become conscious of our will impulses.

When we have reached the point where we discover this actual soul body in ourselves, this second super-sensible part of man's being, the will, grows stronger and stronger, and we recognise it as our sentient body, as the force that works into our limbs and sets our body in motion, as an organisation totally different from our head organisation. In contrast to this head organisation, which I characterised as being constantly in the state of partial dying, we discover that this organisation is constantly in the process of spiritual birth, in which life is increasing and developing all the time. Thus through the head organisation on the one hand, we experience a perpetual dying, and in the will organisation, the second super-sensible member of man's being, we experience a perpetual continuation of the birth process. Out of this continuation of the birth process, out of this increase of life which has to come out of our whole being, there then rays back to us the true, super-sensible nature of our ego, and enters into what we have imprinted into our body. Our ego arises again and again out of the grave of our partially dying head. This perpetual interplay of dying and being born is what we experience within ourselves when we develop our soul life in this way. So we discover that birth and death take place not only at the beginning and end of our lives but that dying and becoming are the expression of forces working in our organisation throughout our lives.

Only when we have thus encountered man's super-sensible forces through Intuition and Inspiration are we in a position to recognise the evolutionary path of mankind; for in developing this kind of vision, the forces we acquire from our head organisation and the organisation of the rest of our body combine to illuminate for us the inner forces at work in the historical development of mankind. How does historical development appear, as a rule, to the ordinary consciousness of present times? If we ignore what men believed in early stages of human evolution out of a primitive conception of mankind and which is now considered childish, namely that there is spirit working in history; if we ignore this, we can say that people nowadays regard history, or rather the evolution of mankind, as a collection of facts gleaned from documents, archives and tradition which, at the most, they link together with the intellect. Not until we perceive the super-sensible being of man, as I have just described it, does the ability to see the progression of higher super-sensible beings through the course of history associate itself with the historical facts which even a spiritual investigator has to take from external history. He gets to know human evolution from the inside, whereas it is usually only looked at from the outside.

So as not just to talk round the subject in the abstract, I will speak of one fact in particular, to show you the evolution of human history from the point of view of symptoms. As man's outlook is restricted solely to the material world, what is presented as history today is just an external picture, and is largely a fable convenue. Anyone who is able to look with inner vision at the connecting link between the facts, discovers that the first thing he sees on looking backwards into our historical evolution is, strange to say, a nodal point in the evolution of modern humanity around the middle of the fifteenth century. We see in a number of spheres something like a forward leap taking place in human development. We know of course that leaps like this take place in nature, too. If we look at the evolving plant, and see first the green leaves developing, then the calyx, and then the transformation into petals, we see a leap from the green leaf to the coloured petal, even though there is a steady development. There is a similar leap in the evolution of humanity in the middle of the fifteenth century, only it passes unnoticed when historical facts are looked at solely from the outside. Something then begins to make itself felt in human evolution that lifts men's souls onto quite a different level of development from the one preceding it. Earlier epochs of human evolution, it is true, also attained considerable heights from time to time, but human souls were quite differently constituted before and after the middle of the fifteenth century. Looking at history from the inside, the middle of the fifteenth century was the end of an epoch of human evolution that actually began in the eighth century B.C., roughly with the founding of the Roman Empire.

Anyone observing history from a spiritual scientific point of view sees a continuous line of development running through the centuries from 800 B.C. until the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. And anyone looking from inside at the Greek or the Roman era will find what is said here thoroughly substantiated. The kind of soul constitution that was developing in man during that epoch was of a kind that nurtured feeling (Gemüt) and intelligence. The surprising thing is that when observing history from the inside, we find that prior to the eighth century B.C. the power of feeling and intelligence was not yet actively at work in the human soul. In those days man was still to a great extent united with nature; he did not step back and reflect on the things he had seen, for his life of feeling was still a part of nature. Not until the eighth century did he free himself from nature and develop forces of intelligence and feeling independently within himself. By and large the whole of historical development from the eighth century B.C. to the fourteenth century A.D. is a gradual unfolding of those particular forces of soul in mankind that produce a flowering of the qualities of feeling and intelligence from out of man's inner being.

This development of the forces of feeling and intelligence, however, still had an instinctive quality about it during this epoch, intelligence and feeling still working in an instinctive way. In the middle of the fifteenth century, however, these forces previously working instinctively in the intelligence and feeling took on a fully conscious quality. Men felt more strongly isolated from outer nature than they had felt before, because in order to think about things consciously and experience their instinctive feelings of sympathy and antipathy consciously, they had to draw back from external nature, so to speak. Everything became conscious. Therefore we can say, from a spiritual scientific point of view, that whilst in earlier epochs the instinctive life of thought and feeling was being developed, from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards what we can call the consciousness soul has been developing, and this stage of development is something that will continue for a very long period of human evolution. Relatively speaking, we human beings are still at the beginning of this evolution of the consciousness soul, which is already responsible for the great progress made in natural scientific thinking. However great Plato and Aristotle were, they did not possess natural scientific thinking, which requires the kind of withdrawal of man's inner being from nature that did not take place until the consciousness soul appeared in human evolution. Thus our development of natural science is part and parcel of one epoch of human evolution. Lessing described this very beautifully, whichever way you interpret his words, by saying that the whole of human evolution is “a kind of Education of Mankind.” Since the middle of the fifteenth century the education of mankind consists of the education of the consciousness soul, and this it is that has actually brought with it the natural scientific outlook. Looked at from inside this is a section of human evolution.

We only understand fully what belongs to the era from the eighth century B.C. till the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. when we look at it from the inside, from the point of view of man's soul development. For the founding of Christianity falls in the first third of this era, and the spiritual scientist sees this as the greatest event that has ever occurred in earthly evolution. With his ability to look down the centuries from inside at man's soul development, the spiritual scientist recognises better than anyone else that in the first third of the epoch I described as the era of the evolution of intelligence and feeling, something was still present that had existed in the highest degree in the days of early humanity, namely something that made man feel a part of the natural world around him; but in those times this feeling arose out of the subconscious depths of the soul. Then there broke upon human evolution the Event of Golgotha, the nature of which can never be understood if people try to understand it merely out of a material conglomeration of historical facts. There broke in upon human evolution a fructification of man's evolution, in that a super-sensible element united with this evolution from out of cosmic heights, preparing the way for man's being to become conscious and inwardly strong to an ever greater and greater degree.

Initially the Event of Golgotha, the Incarnation of Christ as Man, met with a way of thinking and feeling that was still of an instinctive nature. It took the next two-thirds of this epoch for these forces emanating from the Event of Golgotha to flow into man's more or less unconscious instinctive forces of intelligence and feeling. Then from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards came the conscious soul evolution of man and, with it, the epoch of natural science, when men turned their attention to external processes of natural phenomena. The beginning of this epoch was the time in which the earlier connection with the spirit, with the super-sensible element in the world, tended to withdraw in favour of conscious existence. This spiritual element, which in earlier times man perceived as though by instinct in the very phenomena of the world, now sprang to life in his inner being by virtue of the fact that the Being of Christ had united Himself with human evolution. But this new life within man came at the point in his evolution when, as I said, man was becoming increasingly conscious and therefore increasingly external. Thus it happened that just at the beginning of the age of the consciousness soul, the age of the conscious development of intelligence and feeling, although the Christ Impulse was at work in human souls, men's consciousness was of a kind that made them lose sight of their spiritual and super-sensible being. Therefore it also happened that people had less and less understanding for the Event that had united itself with human evolution in a super-sensible way—the Event of Golgotha. In the nineteenth century there was a climax in this respect. Now the point had been reached when the Event of Golgotha was divested of its super-sensible character even in the eyes of most of the faithful. Even for these the Event of Golgotha was, in the nineteenth century, relegated to the world of external facts, so to speak. Jesus the Christ Bearer became the ‘simple man of Nazareth,’ a person no greater than a somewhat more highly developed human being. And this happened solely because, while they were developing the consciousness soul, men also lost the understanding for the super-sensible element in history. The conception of Jesus as the simple man of Nazareth brought materialism into Christianity. And nowadays there is not only a materialistic science, there is also a widespread materialistic faith.

Now, however, we have come to the time—in this epoch of human evolution that began in the middle of the fifteenth century—when we face the necessity of ascending once more to the spirit. And the path I described to you today and the day before yesterday is the path that coming humanity will have to tread to ascend to the spirit again and to find its way once more to super-sensible knowledge and to the super-sensible phenomena lying behind the sense world and behind external historical facts. It is this which will also lead it to the super-sensible nature of the Event of Golgotha. Then this unique Event will appear as the kind of turning point in the whole evolution of mankind that everybody can understand and accept. With the coming of this new super-sensible knowledge the Event of Golgotha will be divested of all its sectarianism, and, rising above separate denominations, even above the religious differences existing in different parts of the world, an understanding of it will become the general possession of mankind. Then the Mystery of Golgotha will be seen to be the most important super-sensible fact of all human evolution. The narrow view of Christ that prevents people from seeing the true mystery—and which still inhibits a number of denominations, because materialism has even found its way into faith—this narrow point of view will be superseded; people will find a new understanding of this Impulse, which is the greatest and most powerful Impulse in the whole of mankind's evolution.

This should show you that spiritual science does not deprive people of what they believe to be the results of ‘simple faith.’ On the contrary, spiritual science reaches up to the highest level of knowledge in order to show mankind the greatest Event of human evolution. This is something modern man longs for if he is honest enough with himself and admits that he is more and more disenchanted with ‘simple faith.’ It had to be stated here as belonging to spiritual science. And as we are in the age of consciousness, in which mankind is dividing and becoming disharmonious to an ever greater degree—because the individual is thrown back on his own personality and his personal loneliness—it is essential to point to what men, the whole world over, need to re-unite them once again.

What is needed today is a new understanding of the central Event of human evolution. Spiritual science does not take anything away from man. On the contrary it gives him just what his present-day consciousness needs. And if people, out of their healthy human understanding, want to complain of the views and teachings of anthroposophical spiritual science, we shall have to tell them that their thinking is not healthy enough and that they must throw off the illusions with which the purely external, material theories of natural science have befogged them; they should think about their own thinking, and then they will make a remarkable discovery about the particular nature of man's present-day life of soul. They will hear what natural science tells them from reliable, strictly methodical sources about the evolution of the physical body. But, when their minds are healthy, they will not be able to agree that there is no more to life as they know it than natural science tells them. They will find that when they listen to spiritual science in a really healthy way, and draw comparisons with life, the contradictions arising out of the illusions produced by materialism are enough to make them ill, and that they will only rediscover life if they refer, with the help of spiritual science, to the super-sensible nature of man and the super-sensible world in which the evolution of man and mankind are embedded.

If you have acquired the possibility in this way of seeing historical life supersensibly, the present world epoch, or epoch of human evolution, will appear before you—it is not the right occasion today to include a description of the whole of earthly evolution; you can read that up in my Occult Science and you will be far enough advanced to aspire to the kind of perception Lessing spoke of in his Education of the Human Race, which he had attained out of his much admired healthy human understanding within the German spiritual stream of development. Then you will be capable of perceiving that in the course of spiritual evolution human life runs its course in repeated earth lives. For the whole span of man's life consists of an altenation between the kind of lives he spends in a physical body and another form of existence between death and a new birth, spent in the super-sensible worlds which are connected with our world through the spirit that is also at work in historical evolution. We discover then, as Lessing also did, that in coming back for repeated lives on earth, man himself carries evolution forward from one epoch to the next. This knowledge of repeated earth lives cannot become a theory in the accepted sense, for when you are capable of penetrating into the spirit of human evolution in the way I have described, you can find this knowledge for yourself, but you have then acquired it as a fact of man's higher super-sensible nature.

A new perception of spiritual life, a perception which will help us find the spirit again in our materialistic world, is about to enter present civilisation. The materialistic outlook prevailing today is largely responsible for estranging man's inner life from a real perception of the spirit, and depriving him of the courage to plunge into this spiritual perception, making him believe that the only way to the spirit is the way of ‘simple creed’ based on a literal acceptance of the Bible. This ‘simple creed’ and the materialism of our time are closely related, for before such a thing as materialism existed, there was not this perpetual harping on a simple creed. After all, at the time when Christianity arose, the teachings about Christ Jesus came out of highly developed spiritual vision, though of course it was atavistic. This old spiritual vision cannot be the way of modern man. Modern man must work for spiritual vision in the way I have tried to describe. If you become aware of what is living deep down in people's souls nowadays and colouring their whole outlook, although they are not fully conscious of it—this mood that unconsciously flashes into consciousness, sometimes in a pathological way, so that people feel it as inner unrest, as a psychopathic tendency, even though they cannot explain it—this mood is the striving for a new spirituality. I certainly do not wish to be so immodest as to suggest or maintain that the spiritual science or anthroposophy I give lectures on is the only thing that has to happen on the path to the spirit. What I have given here is just a humble attempt. And anyone who makes a humble attempt like this, yet is aware that it comes out of the deepest longings of the present time, is also aware that there will be more and more people coming along and attempting to tread the paths to spiritual vision and to proclaim the possibility of ascending to life on a super-sensible level.

But you can see too, that when I lecture on anthroposophy I cannot spare anybody's feelings, at the first encounter, that these things are rather difficult to understand. You will also see that what leads to these spiritual worlds is neither a damping down of clear thinking nor a damping down of the will that works in practical life, but is an intensification of both thought and will. Many people of the present day cannot muster sufficient inner courage for this as yet. So they look at anthroposophy and say: They mean well, these people, but with their anthroposophy they tell us all kinds of things about mankind's evolution, even about cosmic facts of a spiritual nature. Looking at anthroposophy from a safe distance, people like this call it ‘crazy stuff’, etc., terms used here recently in Stuttgart, to apply to the world of physical facts. Yet, ladies and gentlemen, people will never get beyond a nonsensical, merely hazy presentiment of the spiritual world if clear, mathematical thinking and a light-irradiated, self-disciplined will are not applied to bring down real facts from the super-sensible world to replace mere phrases. Modern man needs these facts.

I have spoken to you about what mankind is longing for. And it was this very longing that caused such a caricature of super-sensible striving to arise in the nineteenth century. People only know how to strive in a materialistic way. But alongside this materialistic striving they acquired a yearning for the spirit. So they investigated the spirit on the pattern of their research in the material world and carried out a caricature of spiritual research, namely spiritualism, which is nothing else but a material search for something that can never be matter, namely spirit. What comes out in a pathological way in spiritualism as a caricature of spiritual striving, is the same thing that is being sought for by anthroposophical spiritual science, but in the latter case it is healthy and is based on a further development in clear consciousness of forces already inherent in man.

Anthroposophical spiritual science therefore appears, in the best sense of the word, as an attempt (we mean this modestly) to bring perceptions of the spiritual world, super-sensible man and his evolution into the age of great and outstanding perceptions of an external, scientific nature. Not until these scientific perceptions have been supplemented by the perceptions of spiritual vision will modern man understand his being in the way he longs to. Therefore spiritual science as we pursue it must shake off all the reproaches it encounters, even those from well-meaning people.

To conclude I should like to draw your attention to the fact that even the kind of people who have no intention of rejecting spiritual science are offended when we speak to large audiences about ‘spiritual secrets’, as they call them, instead of keeping these in intimate sectarian circles. Oh, they know very well that it is a sacred duty of the times to stand up and speak to large audiences. Therefore I must not pay attention to the kind of reproach that was made recently:—That it is just not done to speak about cosmic things to a large city audience, like Dr. Steiner does. What is needed is a master of the art of divine gesture who can inexorably drive everyone from his presence who does not know when to be silent. What we need is an approach that can distinguish in more than mere words between what is profane and what is holy.—In answer to this reproach we have to say that we have also entered the age of democracy in the spiritual sphere, and that it is a sin against mankind to wish to distinguish between what is profane and what is holy. Anyone whose destiny allows him to penetrate into the spiritual worlds has the obligation to speak as widely as possible to people's healthy human understanding, so that this healthy human understanding can find the way to the spiritual worlds again.

Although this is an absolutely general task of the times—an obligation to the whole of mankind—we have a special obligation to the middle European region in which we live. If anyone has been deeply interested for decades, as I have, in the beginning made in German spiritual life in the direction of a new spiritual perception by Lessing (who I have mentioned today), Herder, Goethe, Schiller and the German philosophers, then he knows—through the interest he takes in this spiritual life, if he does so in such a way that he makes those forces his own which motivated Goethe, Schiller and the rest—that this spiritual life leads straight into what I have been speaking about today and the day before yesterday. In order to overcome the terrible materialistic development of recent times, we in middle Europe can begin by bringing to mind again that which had its beginnings in the Great Age of Germany. Then what is called anthroposophical spiritual science will follow on naturally. That is why, just at this time when the German spirit is so little appreciated anywhere, we chose to call the building conceived as a High School for Spiritual Science the ‘Goetheanum.’ ‘Goetheanum’ as a sign that from the spiritual point of view, the Goetheanistic German spirit has the courage to face the world.

I know, too, that we are not sinning against Goethe if, in order to link on to something historical, we use the term Goetheanism for the new way of thought and vision we have spoken of today and the day before yesterday. However much is taken away from us in external ways, and however much power the world has today to make things as difficult as possible for us in external matters, it can never take away from us our connection with the best of German qualities, if we ourselves intend having this connection. If we have this intention, however, then even in these dark and sad times we shall not lose hope—the hope of a re-awakening, in a new form, of the spiritual life of mankind, that we are perhaps destined to have just in this time of greatest need.

If we continue with the kind of thing the materialistic age has brought into human evolution in recent times, we shall get further and further removed from the spirit and more and more attached to matter. But if we turn our minds to our super-sensible nature and develop this in ourselves, we shall add the results of spirit vision to the dazzling achievements of the materialistic natural scientific outlook. This spirit vision will then be like the soul of the world conception of outer nature. These two ways are open to human evolution today: either to keep to a perception of the material world and drag mankind further into chaos and distress, or to give birth to our higher inner being from out of our super-sensible nature and the super-sensible world. One of these directions, the materialistic way, can already be seen in the ripples it sends to the surface.

With its external logic of the intellect and its inability to find its way to the inner logic of facts, external science actually sees things very inexactly. I will give you one example of what I mean: There is a philosophical view prevalent at the present time that is a genuine product of materialistic thought. It was advocated by Avenarius and Mach, and it is to the effect that man's field of experience is limited to what he takes in through ordinary sense perception and ordinary consciousness. These two particular men expressed the materialistic outlook by means of some very clever philosophy, and if we inquire into what they expressed with such dedication we shall acquire great respect for their intellectual achievements. If we remain within the ordinary outlook, we shall accept philosophers like Avenarius and Mach as individual philosophical phenomena. But if we go beyond the ordinary outlook, and recognise the inner impulses behind world conceptions such as these, our eyes will be opened, and we shall see the mysterious way these world conceptions work in life. We shall then hit upon the remarkable connection existing between these world conceptions and the decline that threatens European civilisation today, and comes from the East, from Russia, from bolshevism. We shall realise that the practice of bolshevism is the end result of world conceptions like these. This is further confirmed by the fact that the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach is the state philosophy of bolshevism. This connection is known today only to those who penetrate into the spirit of things and who can rise above the noise of party opinion. Party opinion rides roughshod over everything that has to be said right now for the salvation of mankind. This kind of factual logic I have shown you is more important for the man of today than all the logic of sophistry, which would certainly never lead over from Avenarius and Mach to bolshevism. But the facts do. If you want to understand the origins of the things happening today to destroy civilisation within the civilised world, look at the philosophies of the past few decades, the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and you will find further confirmation of the fact that two ways are open to us today: One way continues with the materialistic approach, despite the fact that its logic is as subtle as that of Avenarius and Mach; and the other, that has been characterised here, wants to participate in the spirit. If we carry on in the first direction, the effect on European spiritual life will be that man's spirit will become mechanised, man's soul vegetative and man's body animalised. This is the fate that actually threatens us today. If men become addicted to this western mechanisation of the spirit, this state of being will combine with eastern animalisation, which means that social demands will be on a level of animal instinct and blind impulse. Western mechanisation and eastern animalisation are connected one with another. In between these is the vegetative or drowsy nature of soul that does not want to be woken up by a treading of the path to the spirit. This is the one perspective. Mankind will have to choose between becoming mechanised in spirit, vegetative in soul and animalised in body or going the other way. Hardship and distress will no doubt eventually drive us into going the other way. And although it will be the other people who have the power, they will not be able to bar us from going this other way, the way leading to the spirit. We shall have to want to go this way. We shall have to want to keep our spirit free, even if our bodies are in bondage. Out of the feelings and experience which can come to us out of a consciousness of super-sensible man and the super-sensible world, we shall have to resolve to have inner self-reliance. Then the others will not be able to harm us. And I should like to describe in the following words what might then come about after all:

In the course of the nineteenth century we middle Europeans were foolish enough to copy the western nations, even though there were no grounds for this in western civilisation. Through hardship and distress, through the very power these have over us, we shall perhaps find the way to stop imitating all that we were foolish enough to imitate when we chose them for a model.

Now, when they want to use their power to give us the lead in the mechanisation of the spirit, may we find the strength, in this old middle Europe of ours that has such a great heritage, to tread the path to the spirit from out of ourselves. We shall then avoid the materialistic mechanisation of the spirit and attain the freedom I attempted to characterise as early as the beginning of the 1890s in my Philosophy of Freedom. The liberated spirit will bring us to a real vision of the spiritual world. The spirit will also help us find the way to the equality of man. For human equality can never exist in the external economic order only. As soon as man understands the super-sensible nature of his own ensouled spirit being, however, he will be able to find the law that makes him an equal among equals. He will also deepen science; for with spiritual vision, as I have indicated here today, medicine, law, and the art of education will find their real source. Science will then lead neither to the mechanisation of the spirit as it has hitherto, nor to the inequality of man, for complete freedom of the spirit will come to man when the spirit seeks it on spirit paths; human equality will come to human souls when the spirit seeks it on paths of the soul; and finally, when the human being who knows himself to be a super-sensible spirit being approaches another person lovingly, then—because human beings will be associating with one another as conscious spirit beings in a loving way—in addition to having a liberated spirit and a soul that is equal with its neighbours, man will have, both in his human nature and in social life, a true, spiritualised, ensouled, thoroughly human brotherliness!